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When Councilmember Dona Spring proposed that the Berkeley City Council ask voters to complete bond financing for a new warm pool two weeks ago, the issue died for lack of a second.

But that doesn’t mean the councilmember has given up on the pool, used especially by people with disabilities, the elderly and others who need to exercise in very warm water.

Spring will bring the question of the pool back to the council at tonight’s (Tuesday) meeting, at which the council will also hold a public hearing on the Landmarks Ordinance revision and address public financing of elections. Also, a group has organized a rally to support the Berkeley Housing Authority.

“Many people’s well-being depends on this pool for regular exercise,” Spring said, noting that often people with short-term disabilities are directed to the 92-degree pool by physical therapists.

In 2000, voters approved bond financing for the $3.2 million rehabilitation of the warm pool at Berkeley High. But the work was never done (and the funds were not collected) because the school district decided not to remodel the old warm pool but to employ the warm-pool space for other uses.

The school board, however, has said the city can build a new warm pool on the east side of Milvia Street where there once were tennis courts.

Spring said that it is critical to put the measure on the ballot now because the school district is planning to demolish the old warm pool some time next year.

“If we wait ’til 2008, it will be destroyed,” she said. “The school board has given us half the tennis court area. If the future of the warm water pool is thrown into uncertainty, somebody will find another use [for the land].”

The longer the city waits, the higher construction costs become, she added.

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, however, says because there’s already a $20 million school bond measure on the November ballot, it is hard to ask homeowners to pay for the warm pool bond measure.

“Gas prices are high; people are struggling,” he said, proposing other solutions, such as use of one of the warmer pools at the YMCA or getting other local jurisdictions to help fund a new pool, since people outside the city use it, as well as residents.

The cost to taxpayers for the $8 million project—$3.2 million from the previous bond measure and $4.5 million from the proposed measure, with the city’s general fund making up the difference—would be $5 to $8 per $100,000 assessed value, according to Deputy Director of Finance Bob Hicks, quoting estimates by the city’s financial advisor, Craig Hill, of Northcroft, Hill and Ach.

Union organizing at West Berkeley bowl

On the labor front, the council will address the question of support for “a fair process regarding union representation” for workers at the West Berkeley Bowl.”

Several councilmembers said they had hoped to tie their support for the West Berkeley Bowl zoning changes to support for unionizing the West Berkeley Bowl workforce, but the city attorney said that was not legal.

So Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli, Max Anderson, Darryl Moore and Kriss Worthington are asking the council to support an “open process and rights of employees to organize,” according to the resolution.

Moore said he hoped the resolution would spur both sides to “accomplish this expeditiously, without rancor and without cost.”

Creeks ordinance flows slowly

City staff wants to come back to the council at the end of November rather than September with a revised Creeks Ordinance. That’s because, staff says in a report, that ordinance language needs to be written, and the Zoning Ordinance needs to be revised to include rebuilding after a disaster “by right,” which means with an administrative permit.

The draft ordinance must be reviewed by the Creeks Task Force, the Planning Commission and the Public Works Commission before it goes back to the City Council for adoption.

The council will also hear a presentation by the Berkeley Alcohol Policy Advisory Coalition on the city’s alcohol outlet policy and make policy recommendations regarding the overconcentration of liquor stores.

Workshop: Developer fees

When a developer creates a business, new traffic is generated.

The city is proposing that developers pay a fee to offset the traffic they create, however the business community is concerned that the fees will be a deterrent to those who want to bring new business to Berkeley.

The city will discuss this at a 5 p.m. workshop and hold a public hearing on the fees later during the meeting.

At the same workshop, the council will look at whether to change its inclusionary housing fee rules so that condominium developers pay fees into the Housing Trust Fund that will be used for affordable housing instead of setting aside 20 percent of new condominium units as “affordable.”

Gaia postponed

Councilmembers won’t be taking up the proposed settlement of the Gaia Building’s cultural bonus space Tuesday night as the Planet reported Friday it would. The matter has been postponed until the fall.

Hoping to maintain affordable housing for the city’s most vulnerable citizens, local activists are rallying to save the beleaguered Berkeley Housing Authority.

The agency, long beset by administrative deficiencies, is at risk of dissolution or other restructuring if it fails to earn passing marks on a self-evaluation due to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) at summer’s close. Results are expected in the fall.

Public housing advocates plan to gather today (Tuesday) for a press conference on the steps of Old City Hall, where they will pressure city councilmembers to flex their power to keep the agency in Berkeley.

“The crisis with the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA) is that all of us who are seniors, disabled, low-income people are threatened,” said Eleanor Walden, a Section 8 recipient for 10 years and member of the Rent Stabilization Board. She is co-organizing Tuesday’s event.

“What we’re trying to do is make clear that we have to protect the housing authority from HUD,” she said.

The Berkeley Housing Authority manages the city’s public housing programs, including the federal Section 8 program, which offers rental assistance to about 1,800 low-income residents, of whom about half are seniors or disabled, according to Housing Director Stephen Barton. The agency also owns 75 units of public housing. It is funded through HUD, with an annual budget of approximately $27.4 million.

The Housing Authority is under pressure to correct those deficiencies or face dire consequences, such as absorption into another agency, receivership or total disbandment. In what is billed as the best-case scenario, the authority would secure a new manager and continue to operate as is.

Housing Authority sympathizers hope for the latter.

“We don’t want HUD to take control and we don’t want another agency to take control because we would lose the guaranteed funding,” said Linda Carson, a Section 8 recipient.

According to Barton, if the Berkeley Housing Authority is folded into another authority, there would be no assurance that 1,800 vouchers, whose payments standards range between $952 for a studio to $1,847 for a three-bedroom, stay in Berkeley. However, the city’s existing Section 8 recipients would not lose their vouchers.

Problems clamping down on the agency stem from funding and staff shortages, Barton has said.

The Berkeley Housing Authority is on its third manager in four years; the current manager, Beverli Marshall, is on loan from the Berkeley Public Library.

Financial support from the federal government for administering the Section 8 program has declined. Two years ago, HUD reduced administrative fees by 13 percent, and is expected to slash the budget an additional 8 percent this year, Barton said. To offset funding shortages, the authority cut back the staff roster, from 19 to 13 employees over several years.

“I personally believe, as an activist, that housing is a right, and that as people, we have to fight for that right,” said Walden. “I think it’s an obscenity to have to walk over people in the street, and that we don’t have a viable policy for housing those people.”

Fliers for Tuesday’s press conference went out to the city’s senior housing complexes, the Gray Panthers, tenant rights attorneys and others. Walden expects about two dozen people to attend.

The 11-member Berkeley Housing Authority Board, composed of city councilmembers and two residents-at-large, agreed at its last meeting to grant City Manager Phil Kamlarz the power to negotiate with HUD over possibly restructuring the agency. And, in a last ditch effort to strengthen internal operations, board members earmarked $150,000 in general fund money for additional administrative staff.

But some city councilmembers have cast doubt on whether the authority can pull itself out of the mud.

At the meeting, City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli was quoted saying, “Frankly, I don’t care if we pass (the HUD report). I think we need to get a housing authority that’s functional.”

Margot Smith, of the Berkeley Gray Panthers, disagrees.

“Berkeley has invested a lot of money and effort to have really good public housing,” she said, pointing out, as an example, that the city effectively deconcentrated low-income housing. “I know there are management problems, but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

A proposal to perk up Telegraph Avenue with a new Peet’s Coffee and Tea is in the works.

But developers must first convince Zoning Adjustments Board members to approve the project—though planning staff has recommended they reject it—on Thursday.

The coffee shop, slated for development in the Mrs. Edmund P. King Building, a Berkeley landmark on Telegraph at Dwight Way, would require variances for defying city code, which limits the size and number of quick-serve restaurants in the district.

John Gordon of Gordon Commercial Real Estate owns the property. He could not be reached by press time as he was out of town.

More than 40 quick-serve restaurants pepper the business district, though Berkeley Municipal Code stipulates a cap of 30. Code also requires restaurants to be 1,500 square-feet or smaller; the proposed coffee shop is 1,710 square-feet.

City planning staff have recommended that the board deny the project because no special circumstances exist to warrant further extention of the restaurant quota. Moreover, the building could accommodate other commercial uses that are not subject to size limitations, they say.

City project planner Charity Wagner did not return a call for comment.

Project proponents are also seeking administrative use permit exemptions from parking and sidewalk seating requirements.

The property is a two-story Colonial Revival structure, built in 1901 and designated a city of Berkeley landmark in 2004. Krishna Copy formerly occupied the commercial space. (It has since moved down the street.)

Project developers plan to renovate the building, which was in poor condition when purchased, Gordon wrote in a memo. Crome Architecture, a firm based in Fairfax that has restored several historic structures, is signed on to do the refurbishments.

Peet’s Coffee and Tea was established in 1966. Since Alfred Peet founded the first shop at Vine and Walnut streets, Peet’s has expanded to 120 stores in metropolitan areas across the country, and attracts a steady following of “Peetniks,” faithful imbibers of the company product.

Some say the arrival of Peet’s could spell revival for Telegraph Avenue, where business has been on the decline. The street lays claim to an 11 percent store vacancy rate; the closure of Cody’s flagship store Monday is the most recent and emblematic casualty.

Peet’s wouldn’t necessarily generate much sales tax revenue, said city Community Development Coordinator Dave Fogarty, but it offers other benefits. “I think it would attract a lot of people who don’t ordinarily come to Telegraph,” he said. “It also upgrades the whole image of the area. Peet’s is a very prestigious company.”

Resident Mallory Johnson considers Peet’s a good bet for the empty storefront.

“I am a homeowner … and have been concerned about conditions on Telegraph,” she said in a July 5 letter to planning staff. “The pending closure of Cody’s is a big loss to the neighborhood and businesses such as Peet’s can really help to revitalize the area. Without interest from such businesses, I fear that the stretch of Telegraph will go downhill further.”

Though city councilmembers cannot comment on specific projects, District 7 Councilmember Kriss Worthington lamented the manner in which the city’s zoning process exacts an undue burden on burgeoning businesses.

“There are many problems with the city’s permit system, which makes it hard or impossible for a business to get in, even when there’s overwhelming support,” he said.

“Clean money” supporters failed to get the Berkeley City Council to place public financing on the November ballot two weeks ago, so they are calling out the troops to convince the body to approve the referendum at tonight’s (Tuesday) meeting.

Public financing proponents didn’t know the importance of showing up at the meeting two weeks ago when a Fair Campaign Practices Commission oral report on “clean money” was on the council agenda, according to Clean Elections Coalition spokesperson Sam Ferguson: the Berkeley Progressive Alliance and the local League of Women Voters are calling on their supporters to come to tonight’s meeting.

Ferguson said he wants councilmembers to clarify their positions.

“Last time there were so many abstentions—really only six people voted on this important issue,” he said, referring to the June 27 4-2 vote, with three abstentions on a resolution to place a measure on the November ballot to finance the mayor’s race with public dollars.

Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak, Linda Maio and Max Anderson abstained, while Councilmembers Kriss Worthington, Dona Spring, Darryl Moore and Mayor Tom Bates voted for the measure. (A second vote on financing the council race failed as well, with three councilmembers and the mayor abstaining.)

“Abstaining is a real copout, Ferguson said. “People shouldn’t abstain to kill the issue. People of Berkeley need to know how the council feels about it.”

In a letter to the Daily Planet, past League of Women Voters President Sherry Smith noted the urgency: “Because of time deadlines, the council must pass it tonight or it is dead for at least two more years. This provides a chance for the abstaining officials … to commit one way or another on the questions, rather than declining to reveal their point of view by abstaining.”

Wozniak, who abstained on the vote to put the measure on the November ballot to publicly finance the mayoral race and opposed a second proposal to place a measure on the ballot to publicly finance only the council race, said he favors public financing on the state and local levels. “I think this is a solution in search of a problem,” Wozniak said, underscoring that corruption on a local level is not an issue.

In a phone interview, Smith countered Wozniak’s argument, saying that corruption can be “insidious,” and that it is important “to try to insure that there are fewer temptations.”

Wozniak further argued the measure could attract people from outside Berkeley to the mayor’s race who want to collect the $140,000 in financing.

He added that the proposed limits are so low—$140,000 for mayor and $20,000 for council—that challengers would suffer. He said he would prefer a system where the candidate receives matching funds—thus costing the city less—and allows higher expenditures to challengers, who would generally have lower name recognition.

The ballot measure proposes that candidates participate in public financing voluntarily. If they do, $140,000 would go to each mayoral candidate who gets 600 $5 contributions and $20,000 to council hopefuls who get 150 $5 contributions.

Funding for the mayor-council race would come from the general fund and equal $4 per resident or about $500,000 citywide. Funding for the mayor’s race would cost the city about $300,000.

Berkeley gained a pair of new landmarks Thursday during a meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) dominated by projects planned on the UC Berkeley campus.

But the only move to landmark a building on university land—the Bevatron building at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—deadlocked when neither proponents nor opponents of the move could muster the five votes needed for a decision.

The LPC rejected a proposal to amend one key provision of the new Landmarks Preservation Ordinance that will come before the City Council tonight (Tuesday), while recommending other changes.

Commissioners also learned that a Southern California developer plans a seven-residence luxury development on the grounds of the landmarked Spring Estate at 1960 San Antonio Road. The mansion would be refurbished, but another landmarked structure would be demolished.

Landmark ordinance

Proposed by Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, the revised ordinance limits some of the commission’s current powers and adds a new procedure that would impose a two-year ban on landmarking if commissioners and the public fail to act during a 90-day window.

The revised ordinance is the first item on the council’s action agenda and should draw a large public turnout, pitting a large number of preservationists against developers and infill development proponents.

In that process, the owner hires a professional architectural consultant from a list approved by the LPC. The expert prepares an opinion on the landmark worthiness of the property, which then goes to the LPC.

If the LPC doesn’t start the landmarking process in 60 days, the public has 90 days to petition for the commission to review the property to determine landmark status. If no action is taken within that time frame, the property then enters a two-year “safe harbor,” exempt from landmarking.

What concerns preservationists is that the RFD can be sought where there are no announced plans for development, and the owner can then turn around and file an application the moment the 90-day period lapses.

A week earlier, foes of the Bates ordinance had argued that neighbors often

didn’t become aware of the importance of structures until they learned that someone wanted to tear them down.

But it was efforts to preserve buildings on sites where developments had been proposed that had led to the RFD provision. The City Council has repeatedly overturned LPC landmarking decisions for project sites, and developers have complained repeatedly of the costs inflicted by landmarking-caused delays.

Olson wanted to change language whereby the LPC review of an RFD is called a determination of the “merit” of the property.

She wanted the word “merit” struck because she said it implied a more thorough review than the LPC would be able to give.

While Olson’s change failed, a solid majority voted to support language changes drafted by retired planner John English to correct ambiguities, errors and inconsistencies in the city staff’s ordinance draft.

University projects

While only four commissioners voted to landmark the Bevatron building, which houses the particle accelerator that led to research that garnered physicists four Nobel Prizes, one—architect Gary Parsons—had been converted from a foe to a fan.

He was joined in his vote by Jill Korte, Carrie Olson and Lesley Emmington.

A fifth commissioner, Chair Robert Johnson, abstained, a change of heart from an earlier position of opposition.

Realtor/developer Miriam Ng, one of the LPC’s two newest members, voted no, joined by Fran Packard and architect Steven Winkel. The other new member, architect Burton Edwards, left early due to illness.

An even larger issue than the massive Bevatron building is the university’s plans for the landmarked Memorial Stadium and its surroundings, where UC Berkeley plans a quarter-billion-dollar expansion program that will include three large new structures and a major stadium renovation.

Commissioners offered their comments on the draft environmental impact report the university has offered on the project—a document that both LPC members and city staff have criticized as severely deficient.

“The university has not been very consistent with their own reports,” said LPC Chair Robert Johnson, one of three commissioners who went over the draft in a meeting with city Planning Manager Mark Rhoades.

“We raised a lot of questions about (impacts on) historic structures,” Johnson said, and the group also agreed that no development should take place above the stadium’s historic rim.

The stadium sits directly atop the Hayward Fault, ranked by federal geologists as the Bay Area seismic hot zone most likely to rupture in the next quarter century.

Another structure, the 158,800-square-foot Student Athlete High Performance Center, will be built against the stadium’s west wall, and a 911-space parking lot, mostly underground, is to be built next to the fault to the northwest of the stadium.

The final structure in the project is a 186,000-square-foot building that will unite office and conference areas for Boalt Hall Law School and the Haas School of Business. It will be built across Piedmont Avenue/Gayley Road from the stadium.

Olson said the draft EIR simply failed to address the project’s impacts on Piedmont Avenue, a landmarked streetscape, the stadium and surrounding landscape and three landmark houses on Piedmont west of the stadium.

“What they’re doing is just demolishing all historic resources in that corner of the campus or at the least creating significant impacts,” said Olson.

Commissioner Steven Winkel faulted the document for failing to offer real alternatives to the projects and presenting instead “straw dog alternatives they know are infeasible.”

“The graphics we saw and the documents presented are full of sins of omission,” said Parsons, noting that renderings of the stadium shown the commission failed to include the above-the-rim press and luxury sky boxes that will add 50 percent to the western wall.

“A year ago much more detailed plans were shown to fund-raisers,” Johnson said.

Commissioners voted to create two new landmarks. One was the Bolfing’s Elmwood Hardware store building 2947-93 College Ave., built in 1923 and in continuous service as a neighborhood hardware store the last eight decades.

Owner Tad Laird told commissioners he plans to restore the original exterior and add three living units in a new upper floor.

The second addition to the landmarks roster is the Hoffman Building at 2988-92 Adeline St., a 1905 commercial structure that was designated a structure of merit.

Commissioners also heard a report from Glen Jarvis, the architect who has designed an upscale subdivision for the Spring Estate, a 3.32-acre parcel in the North Berkeley Hills dominated by a 12,000-square-foot reconstruction of the palace of an Austrian empress.

Designed by noted Berkeley architect John Hudson Thomas, the mansion also housed a school for several decades.

Landmarked in 2000 along with two other buildings on the property at The Arlington and San Antonio Road, the site is now owned by Monument Properties 5, a limited liability corporation controlled by Monterey Park developer John Park.

In addition to restoring the mansion, the developer plans to add seven new homes averaging 7,600 square feet.

Bruce Clymer, a San Antonio Avenue Road resident, who lives next to the property, said he and other neighbors were unhappy with plans that he said would “diminish Berkeley.”

LPC voted to form a subcommittee to monitor the project, including Olson, Packard, Johnson and Parsons.

Outgoing state administrator Randolph Ward is moving forward this week with the first of three public hearings to discuss the sale of the downtown Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) properties as education and political leaders and activists are escalating their challenge to both the proposed property sale and the continued state management of the district.

The property sale hearing will be held on Wednesday, July 12, 6:00 p.m., at the district Administration Building at 1025 Second Ave., Oakland.

Included on the agenda are a presentation by the proposed developer of the OUSD properties, and presentations by district staff on the net financial return from the proposed sale, potential options of relocation of the five schools located on the properties, and enrollment projections that might have an impact on the need for more schools in the downtown and east lake area where the property is located.

Under a Letter of Intent signed on June 13, Ward and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell have until mid-September to reach a final agreement with developers Terramark and Urban America for the purchase of 8.25 acres of Lake Merritt-area OUSD properties, including the OUSD administration building, La Escuelita Elementary School, two high schools, and two child development centers.

OUSD trustees originally called for the proposed sale in February of last year, but after O’Connell and Ward engaged in a year of secret negotiations with developers leading up to the signing of the Letter of Intent last month, several trustees have expressed reservations over the announced terms of the proposed sale, as well as the fact that Ward will be leaving the district for a new job in San Diego in the middle of the final stage of sale negotiations.

Since the state takeover of the Oakland public schools in 2003, trustees continue to be elected by Oakland voters but hold no power over district policy or administration.

Last Thursday, a coalition of district education and political leaders met at OUSD headquarters to plot strategies to try to delay the sale, as well as for a return to local control of the Oakland schools. Movement leaders have also said that if O’Connell decides to hire another state administrator to replace Ward, they want a hand in the selection process.

The coalition meeting was chaired by OUSD trustee Greg Hodge and included trustees Dan Siegel and Alice Spearman. Representatives of the Oakland Education Association and American Federation of Teachers were also in attendance, as well as District 16 Assembly Democratic nominee Sandre Swanson and several individuals closely identified with the recent campaign of incoming Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums.

Leaders of the local control movement have said they are going to attempt to enlist the support of both Dellums and Swanson in their efforts.

OUSD Trustee Board Chair David Kakishiba also announced that he is holding a meeting with O’Connell this week to discuss a resolution passed by trustees calling for a timetable leading to complete return to local control of the Oakland public schools by the summer of next year.

The resolution was passed in early June before trustees learned of Ward’s pending departure, but trustees met immediately following Ward’s departure announcement and reaffirmed their commitment to requesting the local control timetable.

Pacific Steel Casting, the subject of noxious odor complaints in West Berkeley for more than two decades, is headed to court.

Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), an Oakland-based environmental health and justice non-profit organization, filed a federal lawsuit against the steel foundry July 6. According to a notice of intent to sue released in May, the suit alleges that Pacific Steel is violating the Clean Air Act for exceeding emissions limits and failing to adequately report emissions.

A staff attorney from the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic of the Golden Gate University School of Law, the firm representing CBE, confirmed the lawsuit Monday, though she did not offer further comment.

Pacific Steel spokesperson Elisabeth Jewel, of Aroner, Jewel and Ellis Partners, said her client was not aware the suit was officially filed. “Pacific Steel has not seen the lawsuit and is refraining from comment,” she said.

If found to have breached terms of the Clean Air Act, the federal law that sets limits on air pollution densities, Pacific Steel may owe as much as $37,500 per violation. At the time, it was unclear how many violations Pacific Steel would be responsible for. The senior attorney for CBE did not return a call for comment by press time.

Residents of West Berkeley have complained about foul odors—which many liken to the stench of a “burning pot handle”—emanating from the plant for years.

In December, the environmental regulatory agency, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), reached a settlement agreement with Pacific Steel, requiring the plant to install a $2 million odor reduction system in addition to other odor-reducing measures. But some residents said it failed to address the gamut of Pacific Steel’s pollution problems.

“The lawsuit is a necessity and it is the first step in daylighting the health impacts of Pacific Steel,” said L A Wood, who says his community watchdog group, Berkeley Citizen, is a plaintiff in the case. The West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs, he says, is also represented.

Wood is among several residents who believe the foundry emits toxins that are hazardous to human health.

Pacific Steel was scheduled to complete a health risk assessment in June but has not yet done so, said Jack Colbourn, BAAQMD director of outreach and incentive. This is cause for great concern, he said.

The air district is taking action against the steel foundry for failing to meet other terms of the settlement agreement. In the last three months, BAAQMD has issued three notices of violation: one for odor complaints, another for permit violations and a third for operating, installing or constructing equipment without the authority to do so, according to Susan Adams, an attorney for BAAQMD.

Pacific Steel, comprised of three plants on Second Street in West Berkeley, is the third largest foundry of its kind in the country.

B-Tech Academy (formerly Berkeley Alternative High School) has secured a major grant from State Superintendent Jack O’Connell to help raise student achievement.

The California Department of Education awarded B-Tech $50,000 through the High Priority Schools Grant Program (HPSGP) June 30. Funds must go toward implementing plans to improve student learning and academic performance. B-Tech was one of 494 schools in 207 districts statewide and the only Berkeley school to receive the grant. A total of $24 million was earmarked in HPSGP funds this year.

The program targets low-performing schools that have scored low on the Academic Performance Index (API). B-Tech was selected from a pool of 689 eligible schools. The grant runs through June 30, 2007, though B-Tech may qualify for additional funds—$400 per student—over the course of three to four years, according to Fred Balcom, HPSGP administrator for the state Department of Education.

The program mandates that B-Tech improve 10 points over three years on the API, measured on a scale of 200 to 1,000. B-Tech last earned a 370, the lowest score in the Berkeley Unified School District.

If the school fails to grow its academic performance, corrective action may be taken. This would involve intervention assistance from the state, Balcom said.

B-Tech is in the process of transforming from an alternative school to a continuation model, where students, some of whom may attend involuntarily, will select from three paths to earn their high school diplomas—a college track, a vocational program or independent study. The district is spending about $139,000 on additional school staff through various funds.

B-Tech Principal Victor Diaz could not be reached for comment by press time.

A 98-year-old Berkeley woman died Thursday in a blaze that confronted firefighters with a swarm of bees and a house crowded with the hoardings of a lifetime.

An 11:36 a.m. call brought firefighters to Jessie Chico’s West Berkeley home at 3036 Dohr St.

Inside the house, firefighters found their path blocked by piles of belongings, including many books, forcing rescue workers to thread their way through narrow paths.

“It was one of the worst cases I’ve seen,” said Deputy Fire Chief David Orth. “There were some areas that were almost impassable.”

Chico’s body was discovered in the bedroom.

Orth said preliminary indications are that she died of smoke inhalation, though a final determination of cause of death won’t be issued until routine toxicology tests have been completed.

One additional complication was the swarm of angry bees that confronted emergency workers at the scene.

“There was a beehive in the house, probably under the eaves, and they were quite upset,” Orth. “It took a while for the smoke to do its job and calm them down.”

In the meantime, several firefighters were stung, but none seriously enough to interfere with their duties, he said.

The fire originated in a gas floor heater, though Orth said investigators may never be able to ascertain the precise cause.

Because the fire led to a death, said Berkeley Police Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, the Alameda County Arson Task Force conducted an investigation Saturday which included investigators from the District Attorney’s office and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Orth said the blaze caused $100,000 in damage to the 87-year-old home and $30,000 in damage to its contents.

A pedestrian was shot in the arm minutes before midnight on June 28 by a gunman who fired from the window of a white Honda as the victim was walking near the corner of Prince and Stanton streets.

Berkeley police spokesperson Officer Ed Galvan said police were alerted to the shooting by an emergency room worker at Summit Alta Bates Medical Center, where the wounded man had driven himself after the attack.

After the victim, an 18-year-old Oakland man, described the shooting, officers searched the scene, turning up a spent shell casing.

Roxie again

The often-robbed Roxie Food Center at 2250 Dwight Way was the scene of yet another crime on June 28. Police were called at 10 p.m. after the discovery that a burglar had managed to make off with 10 cartons of cigarettes, said Officer Galvan.

Repels robbers

A 40-year-old Oakland man fought off a pair of robbers who knocked him off his bicycle and tried to make off with his backpack just after 3 p.m. on the 28th.

Officer Galvan said the two attacked the man near the corner of corner of Carleton Street and McGee Avenue, but fled on foot after they realized their would-be prey wasn’t about to yield without more of a struggle than the not-so-dynamic duo wanted to offer.

Liquor store heist

Two robbers, one of them armed with a small black pistol, robbed Statewide Liquor at 1491 San Pablo Ave. just before closing time on June 30.

Officer Galvan said the pair confronted a store clerk near the cash register just before 1:40 a.m. and demanded the contents of the till.

After the clerk complied, the bandits fled out the back door.

Knifed

A resident of the Ninth Street and Hearst Avenue area called police at one minute after midnight on June 30 to report that he’d just been stabbed.

Reluctant to give any information at first, the injured man finally said his attacker was a woman he knew and named the suspect.

Officer Galvan said the man had been stabbed in the stomach, and shortly after officers arrived the injured man—who had also been drinking—began to lose consciousness.

The case is still under investigation.

Paintballed

A belated report adds yet one more victim to the list of Berkeley residents shot by an unknown assailant armed with a paintball gun.

While four victims were paintballed between June 13 and 16, the latest victim was struck on June 21 as she walked near the corner of San Pablo Avenue and Cedar Street. The woman didn’t report the crime until June 30.

Another knifing

Alerted by a call reporting a stabbing near Sacramento and Harmon streets at 8:16 p.m. on June 30, Berkeley officers and paramedics arrived to find a 45-year-old Berkeley man suffering from multiple stab wounds. None of wounds was life-threatening, said Officer Galvan.

Before he was taken to an emergency room for treatment, the man told investigators he had been stabbed by a woman.

Beating

UC Berkeley Police were called to Tang Medical Center at 1:30 a.m. Friday, where an injured man told them he had just been beaten by a gang of three as he walked southbound on Dana Street near the campus.

The 19-year-old student said one of the three walked up to him, fired off an insult, then punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground where two others joined the assault.

If you’ve put in your eight-plus hours at the office, fought the traffic home, picked up your kids from childcare, no way are you going home to prepare a gourmet meal.

Like millions of others, you may just head for the McDonald’s just down the street—it’ll fill up the kids, even if it’s not the healthiest food, and you won’t even have to leave the comfort of your car.

But if you’re among those whose youngsters attend one of four Berkeley sites where Farm Fresh Choice has a stand at your daycare door, you may snag some squash or broccoli that you can throw in a pan with a little leftover rice, or toss onto a pizza crust—and skip that happy meal.

“We try to combine convenience and access” to fresh fruit and vegetables, said Tiffany Golden, co-manager of Farm Fresh Choice, an Ecology Center project that grew out of the Berkeley Food Policy Council a few years ago.

In south and west Berkeley “there’s not enough access to nutritious foods,” Golden said, pointing to a study the city did a few years ago showing a critical disparity in health between African Americans living in the flatlands and Caucasians living in the hills. African Americans suffer disproportionately from hypertension and diabetes, diseases that access to healthy food can impact, Golden said.

Farm Fresh Choice workers do not ask customers to make radical changes in their diet.

“We honor the cultures of the people that we serve,” Golden said.

Recipes are available such as Joanna’s West African Greens or Martha’s Mayan Dumpling Soup and staff will often cook up a delicious-looking dish that comes with enticing, familiar smells, to encourage people to take advantage of the fresh produce.

The low-cost veggies—they’re from the Farmers’ Markets, but generally cost less because of arrangements with the farmers—won’t be accompanied by lectures about McDonalds. There’s no judging here.

“People know McDonalds is going to kill them,” Golden said, underscoring that what people need is access to healthy choices and ideas for healthy easy-to-make meals.

Farm Fresh Choice is not the only option: Spiral Gardens operates a fresh produce stand each Tuesday and Saturday at Oregon and Sacramento streets. The produce also comes from the Farmers’ Market and is sold at cost.

Daniel Miller, one of its founders, agrees with Golden: “Many of the health issues (in South and West Berkeley) are caused by a lack of access to fresh, affordable food,” he said.

Spiral Gardens is more than a produce stand. It’s a nursery where volunteers and a couple of employees grow seedlings—and even raise chickens. When people come by to choose a plant—most are edible and grown organically—they get their gardening and compost questions answered.

There’s also a mini-farm where gardeners grow vegetables and herbs. They split the bounty between volunteers and the seniors who live next door. Spiral Garden volunteers also pick the fruit from residential trees, sharing it with the owner and homeless shelters.

Programs such as Farm Fresh Choice and Spiral Gardens are important tools in the battle against local hunger, said Kate Clayton, chronic disease program manager with Berkeley’s Public Health Department.

There “definitely” is food insecurity in Berkeley, Clayton said. Food insecurity, as defined by the Alameda County Foodbank is “the lack of nutritionally adequate, safe and culturally acceptable food, available through non-emergency sources at all times.”

Poverty is relatively invisible in Berkeley because the very poor are spread out in the flatlands, Clayton said.

“We don’t see extreme pockets of poverty,” she said, but added that in southwest Berkeley “there’s not access to grocery stores for miles. And with housing prices, low-income folks are living on the edge.”

At the end of the month, a lot of people have to choose between buying food or paying the rent. Alameda County Food Bank fills in the gap with bags of groceries and free meals for some 40,000 people in Alameda County every week, according to Allison Pratt, director of policy and services at the Alameda County Food Bank.

Wednesday afternoon neighbors and daycare moms came by artful display of fruits and vegetables at the Farm Fresh Choice stand at San Pablo Park that Martha Briceno and Joanna Kuunivor had put together. Sung Makawatsakul, pushing her toddler in a stroller, got a basket of ripe, organic strawberries. She lives nearby and also shops at Spiral Gardens. Solange Bainbrige was picking up her son from childcare and took home some fresh fruit.

Then there were the five youngsters 7- to 9-years-old from the summer park program, about to make stir-fry. The kids picked out zucchini, garlic, potatoes, cilantro, cabbage, celery and, uh, mushrooms. (They didn’t really want the mushrooms, but their instructor convinced them to give it a try.)

Before heading inside the center to prepare their feast, one of the children, Carrington Williams, declared proudly: “We’re going to cook it for all of the children.”

Low-cost fresh food and vegetables can be found at the following locations:

The San Francisco Chronicle reported last October that “eight lucky families,” all victims of Hurricane Katrina, would move into a 48-unit apartment complex in West Berkeley under the auspices of a non-profit affordable housing agency.

“The carpet will be new, the walls freshly painted, and there will be clean sheets on the beds, clothes in the closet, and red beans and rice in the cupboard,” the article said.

Nine months later, one of those units lays claim to off-color patches that have seeped up through the carpet, releasing a stench, which the tenant, a hurricane victim, who wishes to remain anonymous, believes to be mold. “I’m concerned about it,” the tenant said. “But what can you do?”

Another resident, also a Katrina victim, bemoaned the prominence of drug-dealers loitering in and around the building. She expected that kind of living environment on the East Coast, she said, where projects feature prominently, but not in Berkeley.

“I’m a working single parent. I’m a college graduate,” she said. “I didn’t expect to be moved here.”

Residents living at and near 2121 Seventh St., also known as the Allston House apartments, are raising concerns over safety and hygiene at the affordable housing complex, long considered a problem location in the largely quiet, residential West Berkeley neighborhood.

Affordable Housing Associates (AHA), a Berkeley-based non-profit housing agency, entered into a lease option-to-purchase agreement for the Allston House two years ago, and has managed the building since. The organization is expected to buy the property from private owners this fall. Unit rents are between $900 and $1,200.

Tenants, some of whom are Section 8 recipients, have reported sewage water flooding the building or coming up through the kitchen sink, unkempt laundry facilities and community space, delayed maintenance calls and other problems, including crime in and around the property.

AHA staff said they are addressing tenants’ concerns and said they received just one complaint about mold, which was dealt with. Since taking the reins, the organization has spent roughly $120,000 on repairing and maintaining the building, said AHA Executive Director Susan Friedland.

“At any given time, you can’t satisfy everybody,” said Friedland. “It’s difficult for our staff to hear public criticism. We’re not slumlords, we don’t do this for gain.”

Lighting fixtures, locks, replaced sewer lines, new doors and laundry machines are among the upgrades. Most recently, management installed new security cameras, on the heels of an incident Labor Day, when a tenant was attacked at gunpoint in the building’s parking lot.

“In terms of health and safety, I feel we’ve been extremely responsive, because everyone should feel safe,” said Erin Patch, off-site property manager for AHA.

Residents hoped new supervision would improve living conditions. It hasn’t, some say.

A homeowner across the street from Allston House, who has lived in the neighborhood for 26 years, says she has seen circumstances worsen since AHA took over.

“There was a noticeable downward trend,” she said. “More trash around the building, an odd, unfinished paint job, the beginnings of construction but no follow-up, rotted wood on some of the balcony areas, generally more noise, a lot more hanging out on the corners—groups of young men hanging out with no purpose except possibly drug deals.”

One tenant, 19, says she and her family won’t take the garbage out at night for fear of getting attacked.

Elias Rodriquez, 12, who spoke to the Daily Planet on behalf of his Spanish-speaking parents, said the family cars have been broken into four times since they moved into the complex three years ago. Three of those incidents occurred in the gated parking lot.

According to the Berkeley Police Department, reported criminal activity at the apartment complex is on the decline. Just one incident was reported at the building since January, said public information officer Ed Galvan, though he did not have older statistics available, which would show trends before and after AHA assumed management.

April Green, who has lived in the complex for 13 years, says there need to be more security cameras, more vigilance with known drug dealers, better locks, better gates and brighter lights. In February, Green and a band of other residents lobbied the city for help. Their complaints have fallen, largely, on deaf ears.

Representatives from the offices of both the mayor and District 2 City Councilmember Darryl Moore say AHA has taken enormous strides toward cleaning up the building.

“As far as I understand the situation, when AHA took it over, there were quite a few issues with crime and habitability,” said Ryan Lau, aide to Councilmember Moore. “But ever since then … they’ve addressed as many problems as financially viable.”

AHA staff say they will make major refurbishments, like flooring replacement, security upgrades, new countertops and other features, once they secure funding to do so this fall.

AHA owns 450 affordable housing units in the Bay Area and manages an additional 75, owned by Berkeley Housing Authority. In recent years, the non-profit agency has been the subject of other tenant grievances. Residents of the Shattuck Senior Homes complained in 2004 about negligent upkeep, a lack of on-site management, dirty floors and trash buildup. Last year, the Tri-City Post reported on mold infestation in an AHA-operated apartment unit, at 1305 Ashby Ave.

“I think AHA is a wonderful organization and it’s providing an extraordinary resource,” said City Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who has assisted residents of the Allston House lobby the city. “But like any organization, they seem to have problems with specific cases that need some attention.”

While the City Council is set to resolve one battle of that structural war known as the Gaia Building, other conflagrations still confront city officials and citizen commissioners.

The council is scheduled to act Tuesday on a request by city planning and legal staff to approve an agreement resolving a long conflict over the use of the first two floors of the high-rise at 2116 Allston Way.

But once that’s done, there’s still work ahead for a multi-agency task force and for the panel that’s hammering out a new plan for downtown Berkeley.

While other questions remain, the most immediate issue—the rules governing use of the building’s “cultural bonus space”—will end should the City Council adopt the compromise worked out with developer Patrick Kennedy.

The cultural bonus, a vaguely worded provision of the current Downtown Plan, was created to encourage developers to create venues for cultural events in new downtown buildings in exchange for the right to make their projects taller than current height limits would otherwise allow.

Kennedy was the first to use the bonus, aided by a City Council eager both for more culture and more housing to revitalize an ailing city center.

In return for creating 10,000 square feet of cultural space, he won the right to add two additional floors to the building, making it the tallest structure built in Berkeley since the Power Bar building.

But the project has been controversial from the start, as documented in hundreds of emails and letters to and from city officials obtained by this newspaper by a request under the California Public Records Act.

When critics and city officials questioned the way he was using the space, Kennedy (a graduate of Harvard Law School) adroitly contested every point, causing Deputy Planning Director Wednesday Cosin to lament in a February email, “Kennedy is trying to work the system again and is not forthcoming.”

But sharp lawyering, perhaps aided by pointed questions from city councilmembers with relatives eager to use the space, has forced a resolution that would end efforts by the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) to hold hearings that could have revoked a city use permits for the space.

It is that settlement the City Council will consider Tuesday.

This article looks at some of the highlights of the long-running dispute. For a fuller account of the documents, see the newspaper’s web site at www.berkeleydailyplanet.com.

Key issues

Two key issues may have foreordained the conflict-ridden morass from which the city is working to extricate itself: the city’s failure to implement specific cultural bonus policies and the pressure to allow for-profit businesses to occupy the space in the Allston Way edifice.

While the 1990 downtown plan created the concept of the bonus, it also called on the city to adopt enabling legislation to spell out the specific requirement in city zoning code amendments.

While the Civic Arts Commission adopted a set of provisions, the Planning Commission and City Council failed to follow up.

Though at least one member of the citizen panel that drafted the 1990 plan has said that the intent was to create space for non-profits, city staff specifically approved the use of the Gaia Building space for a profit-making organization, the Gaia bookstore that gave the structure its name.

A New Age retailer, the store offered author lectures and classes that drew on a passionate base of supporters who flooded ZAB and the city with letters urging approval of the project and appeared to testify on its behalf.

The loudest opposition came from preservationists, who fought to save much-altered historic buildings on the property, including the original home of Berkeley Farms creamery. They sought and won a structure of merit designation by the Landmarks Preservation Commission which was overruled by the City Council.

One of the project’s supporters was City Councilmember Dona Spring, who represents the downtown. She has since emerged as one of the project’s most vocal critics, along with Anna de Leon, another Gaia cultural space tenant and graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law.

Before the building’s opening, changing economics of retailing had driven Gaia Books out of business, leaving the bonus space vacant and unfinished.

The space remained vacant as a series of potential non-profit tenants proved unable to raise the funds needed to fit out and furnish the unfinished interior shell.

Kennedy, the owners of a catering company and de Leon were able to craft the uneasy compromise that exists today, with de Leon in control part of the ground floor and Glass Onion Catering owners Gloria and Tom Atherstone in control of the rest of the two-floor cultural space.

De Leon had been a tenant at a Kennedy building on University Avenue when her landlord invited her to move to his new Allston Way building. But a series of delays, the last resulting from an objection to her liquor license by a Gaia apartment dweller, blocked her move until she was able to open her for-profit Anna’s Jazz Island in May 2005 in the eastern part of the ground floor.

The Atherstones created a new for-profit entity, Gaia Arts Management, to lease and operate the remainder of the space, finding their first part-time tenant in The Marsh, a San Francisco theatrical troupe looking to expand its operations into the East Bay.

Kennedy fitted out the remainder of the ground floor as a theater with movable seating so dinners and other events could be held, and The Marsh began an irregular performances schedule in August, with the catering company also using the venue for dinners, parties and other events.

The first troubles surfaced Nov. 10, when Fire Marshal Gil Dong contacted Kennedy after learning that events were being held on the second floor, despite the fact he hadn’t applied for the requisite city permits.

Missing permits

As recounted in a subsequent memo by City Manager Phil Kamlarz, Dong ordered a “fire watch” for the five upcoming scheduled events on the mezzanine. “Patrick was also advised that after December 16, 2005, he would be required to possess the proper Assembly Permits and obtain a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy to use the second floor for events.”

Another event, a reception for Berkeley Repertory Theater, was scheduled that weekend.

While Dong would allow a fire watch for the Berkeley Rep event, the city wasn’t inclined to allow further events without providing accurate second-floor plans and applications for the permits, as well as a detailed account of a specific performance standard for the space.

Kennedy submitted vague plans in an improper format three days later, meeting with MacQuarrie’s prompt rejection.

A day later, Cosin emailed Dong to urge him to allow events to continue until the permits were obtained: “When I head about proposals for a benefit for Hop-a-long [sic] Animal Rescue and a holiday party for Clif Bar, a business that we are desperately trying to keep in Berkeley, I see a lot of pressure to make it work as long as he does what we tell him to do.” (Emphasis added.)

While Kennedy wanted an occupancy rating of 300 for the second floor, Dong fired back, calling the number “not appropriate,” and declaring that 31 was the proper figure. Kennedy had also never responded to the order to post fire watches and, as a bottom line, no events could be held without the fire department-issued assembly permit.

There was also the matter of an illegal fire exit sign posted at a too-narrow stairway and the lack of required fire extinguishers.

On Nov. 21, Kennedy emailed Cosin claiming “we had approval of plans showing assembly use all along,” approved by the Fire, Building and Planning departments with an approved capacity of 320 in the mezzanine.

Nonetheless, he promised new plans.

The next day, Kennedy filed to modify his use permit so he could change the plans submitted with a June 2003 letter by de Leon and signed by then-Planning Director Carol Barrett, outlining the performance standard that remains in force today. The revision would allow conversion of a never-built office for classroom purposes and create a food preparation and utility room for catered events.

The following day, Kennedy emailed Dong a list of four upcoming events, a bar mitzvah and the Hopalong and Clif Bar parties planned for both the main floor and the mezzanine and a Dec. 16 corporate party on the main floor only.

Kennedy noncompliance

Kamlarz described what happened next in a March memorandum: Kennedy “was notified that a ‘fire watch’ was required for the remaining events; that he needed to email Fire Marshal Gil Dong the security company that was hired to provide the fire watch, and to post the occupancy load of 133 on the 2nd floor for the events. Patrick did not complete any of the requests.”

Instead of hiring the legally required trained fire watch, the developer had an employee of his management company attend the events. In a later email he contended he didn’t know of the special requirement.

As the battle over permits continued, conflict arose on another front.

On Jan. 7, police were summoned to the theater space after a private party for a 15-year-old turned into a debacle with unruly youths climbing out the second-floor level windows. As police shut it down, an angry guest hurled a bottle at police as they tried to control the angry crowd eager to get in.

Two days later, de Leon would file a four-page complaint with the Zoning Adjustments Board, laying out the her complaints about Kennedy and Gaia Arts Management.

On the Jan. 10, de Leon emailed Councilmember Spring, asking for help in protecting her business from unruliness next door, and the Daily Planet ran excerpts of de Leon’s complaint.

The next morning, Kennedy emailed Cosin to complain about the article, and to ask why the city had failed to respond to complaints he’d made about de Leon’s permits.

That same afternoon, Aurora Theater Development Director Daria Hepps emailed Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, saying the story “heightens our concern about having our big fundraiser there March 27. Could you please look into this with the appropriate people at City Hall and let me know if this is something I need to be concerned about ... It would be really devastating if we had to cancel or move the event at the last minute.”

Left unstated was the fact that Wozniak’s spouse, Evie, is a member of the theater’s board of directors.

Eight minutes after the Hepps email, MacQuarrie emailed Cosin with an even more critical announcement. Building Inspector Malcolm Prince had just discovered that no temporary certificate of occupancy “had been issued or requested (for the first floor performance space), so he (Kennedy) is occupying the space in violation of the code.”

Sixteen minutes later, Fire Marshal Dong emailed Kennedy, writing that he didn’t have a fire permit because he hadn’t requested the inspections needed to get it—and which he couldn’t receive anyway because he lacked temporary or permanent certificates of occupancy for either of the floors.

Further, Kennedy had listed different occupancy figures in his applications for his fire assembly permit than he did on the other permit applications he had filed with Cosin’s department.

A fire inspection would also reveal that standpipe for an emergency fire department hookup on the second floor was in a location inaccessible in the event of a fire. Kennedy denied that it was problem, though Dong would warn on Feb. 8, “Essentially, there is no hookup to fight a fire on the 2nd floor.”

Noisy concert

Meanwhile, Mario Capitelli, a nephew of City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli booked space on the ground floor to hold a series of youth rock concerts.

On the morning of Feb. 12 after the first concert, Kennedy emailed Cosin to say “Event a success with no major incident. No cop or fire calls ... Laurie [Capitelli] apparently drop [sic] in. Can give you more details.”

Cosin replied: “Very glad to hear it ... Now you have to wrap up details with the first floor FAST!”

Minutes later de Leon emailed Cosin and Mark Rhoades to report that rock bands had drowned out the jazz musicians performing in her club with noise far louder than had been permitted at her old club on University Avenue.

Three minutes later, Cosin emailed Kennedy. “I must report now that I did get an email from Anna complaining again ... I have a difficult time weighing the merits of her argument, but I will continue to work with her.”

Kennedy forwarded a report from his building manager, Steve Walker, who had reported on “a significant noise bleed that travels up the elevator shaft and also through the building. Mario mentioned that he has dealt with noise reduction successfully at every venue he has worked at. But unless we can come up with an alternative solution, this issue will continue [sic] arise with the Gaia tenants.”

The noise problems led Councilmember Spring to ask city staff to see if a noise meter could be installed in the apartment area courtyard which would enable tenants to call the city when noise exceeded appropriate levels.

De Leon emailed Rhoades and Cosin on Monday, Feb. 13, that “without volume controls for the rock and roll shows, I will be unable to book quality music in my venue.’ With two more concerts booked for Feb. 25 and March 5, she wanted to know how the city regulated noise levels.

The city, however, has no ordinance governing indoor noise, she learned.

Councilmember Linda Maio emailed Marks with her comments on de Leon’s pre-concert email to Kennedy. “Dan, this description ... is not what we gave a cultural bonus for ... Can you tell me how we are proceeding with clearing up what use is permitted, not permitted, in the cultural space.”

Cosin replied to Maio that live bands were a cultural use, open to the public.

Resolution

The complaints from de Leon had led concerned ZAB members to hold the first of a series of discussion about the Gaia Building’s use of the cultural space, raising the specter of revoking its use permit and reopening just what could and couldn’t be done with the space.

Kennedy threatened legal action, citing the now-three-year-old letters signed by Carol Barrett and Anna de Leon and a deed restriction he had filed at the city’s insistence that specifically stated that for-profit uses were allowed in the space.

Kennedy initially interpreted the performance standard in the letters as mandating that 30 percent of the time the space would be used for performance-related uses, which could include rehearsals and set-up time, with for-profit private parties and events allowed the rest of the time.

De Leon, the author of the letters, insisted that the 30 percent was actually just performance time, with rehearsals and preparation requiring additional time. Though he initially objected, Kennedy has conceded the point in the proposed agreement now before the council.

In the meantime, the developer has submitted the required plans and applied for the needed permits to bring the performance space into compliance with city ordinances. He has also agreed to relocate the standpipe for safe firefighter access.

Whatever happens next will be closely watched from many quarters, including two city bodies.

The question of bonuses is still under consideration by a joint task force of ZAB and the Planning and Housing Advisory commissions, and the issue will be on the minds of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, which is now preparing an update of the 1990 plan, which will cover an expanded downtown area.

Finally, construction of the second building to incorporate the cultural bonus, the Berkeley Arpeggio (nee Seagate Building), is scheduled to commence at the end of August across from the new Berkeley City College Building on Center Street.

Because of the lessons learned from the Gaia Building, city staff, commissioners and the council imposed conditions that restrict the space to performance-related use—with the nonprofit Berkeley Repertory Theatre as the occupant, with the obligation to allow other community groups to make use of the space.

The 12-year-old seventh-grader at Cal Prep in Oakland participates in AileyCamp, a free, intensive, six-week camp, where 90 middle school students are taught jazz, ballet, African and modern dance, in addition to personal growth lessons. The camp, a production of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, is in its fifth year in Berkeley. Cal Performances raises funding for the program.

Monday through Thursday, students attend dance classes at Zellerbach Hall with renowned, professional instructors. Among them Willie Anderson, a principal dancer with Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley; Derrick Minter, a rehearsal director for Ailey II; Naomi Diouf, Berkeley High School dance teacher; and Alicia Zakon, creative director of Zari Le’on Dance Theater.

On Fridays, students venture beyond the Cal campus for field trips. Last week, they sailed boats at the Berkeley Marina.

“[The camp] really gives youngsters structure,” said David McCauley, camp director and former Ailey dancer. “We do it in the guise of dance, because it has a proscribed way of happening, though it teaches them life skills.”

Students enter the program from all walks of life. Most are underserved; they come from single-parent households, foster care and homeless shelters. They learn about the camp through McCauley, who gives presentations to East Bay schools during the school year, and invites those interested in the program to submit an application.

Some, like Tiana Watson, a seventh-grade student at Frick Middle School in Oakland who has taken African and Caribbean dancing, have extensive experience in dance, while others, like Ascend seventh-grader John M. Alba-Cerritos, have none. Before AileyCamp, Alba-

Cerritos, 12, never slipped on a pair of dance shoes. Now, when he discusses career goals, modern dance and jazz feature prominently.

Campers are bound to a strict dress code. In class, girls wear black tights and a leotard; boys wear white T-shirts and shorts. Outside of class, all wear AileyCamp T-shirts and shorts. No earrings. No nail polish. No distractions.

This year, an unprecedented 22 boys attend classes, compared with the program’s first year, when just two boys participated, said Cal Performances spokesperson Christina Kellogg. Boys are drawn to the program, in part, because it is analogous to athletics.

“It really is a physical activity that is as demanding as sports,” said McCauley.

“And you have to be graceful,” Kellogg added.

By many accounts, the class regarded as the least restrictive, African dance, is accorded the most popularity.

“Look ridiculous,” the students say they are told. On Wednesday, they took heed, twirling around, flapping their arms and abandoning the rigid posture their ballet instructor insisted upon earlier in the day.

Students break from dancing to eat meals—they are served breakfast and lunch—and to attend a personal development session, where they discuss violence, sex, drugs, hygiene, body image and communication skills.

Instructor Tina Banchero, a former dancer, relates to students via pop culture—she quoted rapper 50-cent in a discussion about violence—which sets the stage for them to feel comfortable sharing their opinions and personal experiences.

Several former students have gone on to attend schools with emphases in the arts, McCauley said. Others return to camp as helpers. Yejide Najee-Ullah, 18, a recent Berkeley High School graduate, has volunteered since in 2003. She was a student in 2002.

“Initially, I didn’t want to go (to camp). It was my summer before high school, but I ended up loving it,” she said. “I feel like I’ve needed to give back because I got so much out of it.”

Diouf, who has taught West African dance and culture at Berkeley High School for 16 years, has seen students transform through AileyCamp.

They come in “bandana-wearing—really rough and tough,” she said. “By the end of the camp, a beautiful person emerges, and they become a spokesperson for the camp.”

AileyCamp started in Kansas City, Mo., in 1989. The program also operates in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Bridgeport, Conn., and Kansas City, Ks.,

This year’s Berkeley camp will close with a performance Thursday, Aug. 3, at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall. Admission is free. To obtain tickets, go to the Cal Performances Ticket Office at Zellerbach in advance or the night of the show.

Students practice their ballet moves at the AileyCamp at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus on Wednesday. The camp, offering free dance classes to 90 middle school students, is in its fifth year. Photograph by Suzanne Le Barre.

The Associated Students of UC Berkeley (ASUC), the governing body representing Cal’s 33,000 students, held elections in April, but the new batch of executive officers remains a mystery, following allegations—and a ruling—that the dominant party engaged in illegal campaigning then lied about it.

In early June, four members of Student Action, the university’s largest political party, were disqualified from the election after sweeping the executive slate, composed of a president and three vice presidents.

Cal’s nine-member student Judicial Council ruled that Student Action party chair Suken Vakil had committed perjury when he gave dishonest testimony when questioned, in an earlier trial, about his party chalking slogans near six campus polling sites.

Campaigning within 100 feet of the polls, provided that the polls are properly marked off, is a violation of ASUC by-laws. Vakil is currently out of the country and could not be reached for comment.

Now, Student Action is appealing that decision. A hearing is set for July 15.

In the meantime, outgoing ASUC President Manny Buenrostro, of Student Action, who did not return a call for comment, has issued an executive order temporarily placing the disqualified candidates in office, an order that was quickly contested. (He rescinded an earlier order to unilaterally recognize the candidates, which was also challenged.)

Complicating matters are the new/ disqualified officers, who, according to the conservative blog Cal Patriot, are wielding executive power by issuing orders and making appointments.

Cal students contribute monthly fees to ASUC, which is charged with allocating funding to student groups. Elected ASUC officials include a president, three vice presidents, an apolitical student advocate and 20 senators. Student Action is the major party, followed by CalSERVE and the Defend Affirmative Action Party, neither of which ran an executive slate this year, then SQUELCH!.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. If the Student Action appeal were successful, the four disqualified candidates, Oren Gabriel, Vishal Gupta, Joyce Liu and Jason Chu, would be reinstated and eventually sworn into their respective seats, according to Election Council Chair Jessica Wren.

If not, the Judicial Council could mandate a recount, she said. However, the League of Women voters, which acts as a third party to ASUC elections, has called the legality of such an event into question, Wren said. Another option is to hold a new race in the fall. Elections typically cost about $50,000, she said.

Student Action could also threaten to take the case to state or federal court. According to Ben Narodick, SQUELCH! candidate for external vice president, this could affect ASUC’s autonomy, because the court may rule the fate of the elections away to the university. A court case could also incur major costs, he said.

ASUC “would have to hire a lawyer, and that would come out of money that student groups would get,” he said.

Vishal Gupta, the spokesperson for Student Action, who also ran for external vice president, declined to respond to specific questions about the election.

The last UC Berkeley student government case to go to trial was in 1984, Narodick said, though according to Sonya Banjeree, Judicial Council Chair, it is not unprecedented for a party to get disqualified. A similar case came up in 2004 with the Defend Affirmative Action Party, and was settled out of court, she said.

The election saga has unfolded on Cal blogs like CalStuff, Beetle Beat and the Cal Patriot, where some pundits are calling the reputation of the ASUC into question.

“The people who truly care about the ASUC are worried about its credibility as an organization,” writes Chris Page on Cal Patriot. “They know if the situation goes to court, the ASUC’s autonomy will take a hit.”

ASUC Auxiliary Director Nadesan Permaul, who advises students, says the election is a valuable learning experience for students, comparing it with the presidential election showdown in 2000, the recent Supreme Court ruling in Vermont over campaign financing and the evergreen political hullabaloo closer to home.

He said, “While others may think it’s unusual, just look at Berkeley city politics.”

Neighbors of Bateman Mall met with Berkeley city officials for the third time on Thursday to discuss the city’s conceptual plan for the restoration of the grassy mall.

Residents of Prince and Dana streets said they were irked by the city’s failure to honor the agreements over the restoration of Bateman Mall Park. made with the Bateman-Prince-Colby community at a May 15 meeting.

According to the neighbors, time is running short for the restoration project and the situation has been made worse by the city’s inability to get the plans to the residents for review by the middle of June, as they had been promised at the May meeting.

The neighbors said they still expect the city to finish the restoration by the start of the rainy season around the middle of October regardless of what needs to be done to make it happen.

Peter B. Eakland, associate city traffic engineer, along with Loren Jensen, the city’s drainage engineer, apologized for the delay and presented a project plan to the neighbors. After discussion about various drainage possibilities, it was decided that a grass crete acting as drainage would give the best aesthetics and also act as efficient drainage.

The neighbors however were against open drainage on the sidewalk as it would couse problems for those using strollers and wheelchairs.

“We also need to keep in mind that the current in the open drains during the rains is strong enough to wash away a 1-year-old playing in the Bateman tot-lot,” said Jocelyn Bale Glickman, a resident of Prince Street. “We would therefore like it if the water when it gets to the sidewalk, goes under the sidewalk.”

In the end neighbors and city officials both decided that a grass crete road acting as a drain, with the possibility of a verm, ultimately leading to drainage under the sidewalk instead of over it, would be the best option.

Regarding sinage, it was decided that there would be “No Through Access” signs placed on both ends of the cul-de-sac but that the mall itself would remain sign-free. The curb would be chamfered to give firetrucks access during emergency operations and would be painted red.

Eakland also informed the residents that after survey work was completed, expected by the end of July, a plan would be sent to Alta Bates Hospital by Aug. 15 for a review. Following that, negotiations between Alta Bates and the contractor would continue for two weeks. Restoration work is scheduled to begin Sept. 1.

The neighbors were informed that Alta Bates would not be spending any more money on the restoration than what was initially budgeted. The project cost at present comes up to approximately $16,000.

The neighbors stressed the fact that maintenance of the mall was also an important issue, as the city has neglected to clear clogged drains in the past, creating the flooding problems.

Eakland and Jenson outlined their long-range plans, which included a detailed survey of the Dana and Prince streets drainage problem with plans to improve it in fiscal year 2008.

SAN JOSE—If this city were a person, it would be a middle-aged man on the tail end of a spiraling career who, having just gone through a mid-life crisis, buys a glitzy new house and tries to hook up with younger women, then lies to his family about it. In other words, San Jose would be our current mayor, Ron Gonzales.

Until recently, most of San Jose associated scandal with Gonzales due to his soap opera-like affair with a young intern. Now Gonzales has been indicted on charges of felony bribery, conspiracy and misuse of public funds for a deal he made with Norcal Waste Systems, a garbage company. This latest scandal fits right into the narrative of San Jose in the post-dot-com era. Just like that mid-life crisis guy who still goes to dance clubs to reclaim a lost past, our city was destined for public disgrace.

Before the dot-come crash, we were the storied city that had moved from orchards to computer chips. Every region in the world seemed to want to be at our speed. There was Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Forest in Portland, Ore., even Silicon Hills in Texas. Back then, in the late ‘90s, our new Latino mayor was addressing the Democratic National Convention and being talked about to succeed Gray Davis as governor of California.

After the crash, our economic and political blueprint lost its allure, and so did our mayor. But once famous, it’s hard to go back to being known as a San Francisco suburb (as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom called us at a mayors’ conference earlier this year). We have been desperate to save face ever since.

The Norcal deal with Gonzales was a result of the obsession with appearances that has become a strategy for governance in San Jose. In 2000, Gonzales and his aide struck a private deal with Norcal Waste Systems—the mayor would help get the city to pay an extra $11.25 million to Norcal to cover Teamster wages. Investigations say that Gonzales later convinced the city council, which did not know of his agreements with Norcal, to raise garbage rates to cover the cost.

Gonzales originally denied any previous talks with Norcal, but acknowledged last summer that he made the agreement to support a future pay increase. But even after having been indicted by a grand jury, Gonzales refuses to leave office. What the district attorney’s office is calling bribery, he calls an attempt at “labor peace.” According to Gonzales, he was doing what he could to avoid the most publicly embarrassing of labor conflicts—a garbage strike.

People seemed shocked by his audacity, but I can see why Gonzales feels justified in staying on as mayor. He got caught reaching for an end he and the rest of the city’s leadership has been pushing since the dot-com bust—maintaining San Jose’s appearance as utopian and conflict-free, regardless of the means or the cost.

Take, for example, our new City Hall. A $380 million Star Wars-esque monstrosity planted in the heart of downtown, it is a domed structure walled mainly by glass, with a constantly running spray of water in the entryway. It was built as the city was cutting millions in spending, having been decimated by the dot-com gamble, and we now owe $25 million a year for the foreseeable future to pay off the construction.

That construction was marked by a scandal similar to the current one—city officials worked a secret deal with Cisco Systems to ensure that Cisco would win an $8 million dollar contract for the telephone and wireless systems used in the building.

But even after that initial hiccup, San Jose got back on track to build the most futuristic City Hall/Death Star replica it could. Now the city council is trying to approve a $300,000 subsidy to build a Starbucks inside its walls.

Consider also the new moniker that we have taken on, now that “The heart of Silicon Valley” has lost its cache: “The safest big city in America.” We won the title four years in a row, making us some sort of safety dynasty. Every year the mayor puts out a press release on the topic, which our local paper embraces as front-page news.

To maintain such a title, we tolerate disturbingly high reports of conflict between the police and community. We had so many cases of officer-involved shootings that we became one of the first cities in the nation to give all officers tasers in 2005, a supposedly non-lethal option that had the added advantage of contributing to the whole high-tech look.

After implementation, reports found a disproportionate usage of tasers on people of color, and the rate of officer-involved shootings only got higher. And as the city goes for our fifth straight victory in the safest-city contest, we have ever increasing rates of racial profiling and complaints of overstepping by police—a 33 percent increase since 2003, according to the Independent Police Audit.

In the end, Gonzales likely will not do any time, and will be able to finish his term, which ends in December. Last week, the City Council—after having put on a fiery display in the media about forcing the mayor to resign—ended up only taking away roughly 6 percent of his budget and asking him to disclose his appointments calendar and phone logs. A lengthy attempt to force him out would result in more city dysfunction being talked about all over the country, and no one in San Jose leadership wants that.

But the damage has already been done. We have become a city that no longer has any confidence in its leadership. The two candidates who are battling to succeed Gonzales, Cindy Chavez and Chuck Reed, have shrunken their campaign promises to meet lowered expectations—“I won’t make backroom deals.”

Critics of the mayor say that it was pride—the same characteristic that brought him success in his early years—that led to his downfall. San Jose as a city has fallen on the same sword. We were a city that once seemed to be the future; now we’re stumbling as we reach back toward that once-glorious past.

UC Police are looking for two men suspected of raping an intoxicated student in People’s Park on the night of June 25.

The 20-year-old victim told investigators she was assaulted by two acquaintances while she was unconscious, according to an alert issued by campus police Chief Victoria L. Harrison.

Officers found the woman in the park at 10:14 p.m.

Chief Harrison asked anyone with information about the assault to call Detective Norma Caro of the department’s Criminal Investigation Bureau at 642-0472 during business hours and 642-6760 during nights and evenings.

Berkeley police received a report of another rape just after midnight on June 30. The incident happened in the 1900 block of Channing Way, but no further details were available.

Rat pack robbery

A 23-year-old pedestrian was robbed by a gang of six teenagers as he walked across the northern end of Sproul Plaza shortly before 7 p.m. June 27.

According to UC Berkeley Police Chief Harrison’s crime alert, the pedestrian was struck in the back of the head and knocked to the ground after the gang surrounded him.

The 17-year-old who landed the blow scooped up the fellow’s skateboard and the gang ran off, with their victim in pursuit.

Campus officers spotted the chase and managed to arrest the skateboard-toting assailant, who turned out to be the 17-year-old they had arrested the night before for an assault that had occurred in the Dwinelle Hall parking lot.

Editor’s Note: Between 1995 and 2001, according to the Federal Reserve bank, the average family of color saw their net worth fall 7 percent to $17,000 while the average white family's net worth rose 37 percent to $120,000. Meizhu Lui is one of the co-authors of “The Color of Wealth,” and the executive director of United For a Fair Economy.

Sandip Roy: A quick definition: what do you mean by wealth?

Meizhu Lui: Wealth and income are different in that income is more like a stream; it comes in and then it runs out. Wealth is more like a pool or a lake that you can draw from, and it’s really important these days, especially when jobs are not so secure. It helps you weather a rainy day of unemployment, a medical emergency, provides for your retirement, and something to pass along to your children. By wealth, we don’t mean massive amounts of money. We really just mean enough to feel economically secure.

SR: You write housing accounts for only 32 percent of their net worth of a white family, while for blacks, it accounts for 62 percent of their net worth. What’s the significance of a statistic like that?

ML: In the United States after a savings account and a car, the home is the next big thing that gives you a bit of a cushion. You can sell it and it will give you some return. But the interesting thing about that statistic is that the value of the home is quite different. African American homes are worth about $45,000—that’s the median value—whereas for whites it’s $142,000. So, there’s a disparity there as well.

SR: Would you say that each ethnic group has its own particular roadblock to the accumulation of wealth, or is it pretty much a common problem across the board?

ML: There is a common problem, which is that people from Europe defined themselves very early on as a superior group, the only group really eligible to be full American citizens and therefore eligible for the benefits thereof. However there were different barriers for each group.

Native people’s philosophy about land was that it was not to be privately owned, that it was something that was commonly held not only for the next seven generations, but for plants and animals. But when the Europeans came, their idea of land was that you had to divide it into little parcels, owned by private individuals, and if you didn’t have a fence around it, it wasn’t worth anything.

So, the expropriation of Indian land was really the first vast transfer of wealth from one group of color to another.

Of course, for African Americans it is the expropriation of their labor, and if they were to be paid wages, not necessarily high wages, just wages for their labor, there would be about $1.4 trillion circulating in the African American community today.

For Latinos, it’s mostly about foreign policy, that was considered the US backyard, and it still is, so under the guise of protecting Mexico and other countries from European powers, the US created policies that kept the resources at the beck and call of the US.

As for Asians, the Naturalization Act of 1790, one of the first acts of Congress, said that in order to become naturalized as an immigrant, you had to live here for two years, you had to be an upstanding character, you had to be loyal to the constitution, and you had to be white. So that was the first introduction for this word white, and when the Chinese and these other groups sued for the right to be white and lost, what it meant was there was no protection for their property, they were subject to discriminatory laws.

So, for example, the Foreign Miners Tax during the Gold Rush that the Chinese miners paid but not European miners, accounted for about 25 percent of California’s budget. But not having the benefits of citizenship, if somebody stole their claim to a mine, there was no legal protection for them.

SR: But even for white Americans, there are many more Walmart clerks than Bill Gates but their average assets would be $30 billion which unfairly skews the numbers. Why not tackle poverty across race instead of focusing on race?

ML: We really can’t talk about equality if we don’t look at racial equality at every period of U.S. history. There has been an alarming gap that still exists today, and, at every step of history, the government has given boosts to white families. So I think the myth that we’re trying to debunk is that it’s only because of your own hard work that you get ahead in society. The invisible, dirty little secret is that government policies and government subsidies have helped whites and have put barriers in front of people of color at every period of U.S. history, and that makes a big difference. For example, in the ‘30s when Social Security was first implemented domestic workers and agricultural workers were left out of that legislation, and those were the two occupations that were held most heavily by African Americans and Latinos.

SR: But given that we do live in a capitalist society, what is White America’s interest in narrowing this gap?

ML: First of all, just to give an example about class, when the G.I. bill was first passed, which gave free college tuition to working class, white GIs--not explicitly limited to white, but that was the way the program ended up being implemented—there were people who said these working class guys, they’re just going to mess up our educational system because they don’t have the brains to do it.

Clearly that wasn’t true, and for every dollar spent on a white GI’s education, there has been about a $12.50 return in terms of the growth of our economy.

So if we think of all the people that we are not investing in today, and not allowing them to develop their skills and talents, how are we going to compete in the global marketplace? It will boost everyone, it will boost white people as well, if we allow more resources to go to people of color.

Sandip Roy interviewed Lui for “UpFront,” a NAM weekly radio program on 91.7FM, San Francisco. Roy is an editor for New America Media.

Opinion

Editorials

In my voicemail this Monday morning: a message from one of my many red-diaper-baby chums, born again to political activism after a brief mid-life flirtation with Republicanism. “Schwarzenegger is trying to bust the nurses’ union! Come to a rally on Tuesday! If you don’t we’ll soon see 100 patients to every nurse!” Well, she might exaggerate a bit, but she’s oh, so right in principle. Things are bad in hospitals now, and if the medical industry has its way they’ll be getting worse.

How do I know this? Well, a week ago last Thursday my father, in his nineties and suffering from osteoporosis, took a fall in his back yard. He complained of back pain, but since it was the Fourth of July weekend, and following his primary care doctor’s telephone advice, my mother decided to wait until Monday to have him checked, having too many times suffered though multi-hour waits in the emergency room at Alta Bates. But he was worse by Monday morning, couldn’t stand or walk any more, so at 9 a.m. she called 911 and the splendid team of Berkeley firefighters who responded took him in to the emergency room.

Those of you who have been lucky enough not to get very sick yet, or who belong to Kaiser, might not realize that the emergency room is now the main locus for urgent care for almost all patients who aren’t part of Kaiser, whether well-insured or homeless. My parents have the very best insurance coverage (my father is a retired UC administrator) but when they have any medical problem of any complexity outside of business hours, it’s the ER or nothing.

It turns out that waiting until Monday didn’t help. The two of them, both over 90, arrived at 9:30 a.m., and stayed there until 10:30 at night, when my father finally made it into an upstairs hospital bed.

The diagnosis was predictable: a compression fracture of a vertebra, confirmed by imaging, not life-threatening but very painful, too much for my mother to deal with at home. One might question why 13 hours in the emergency room were needed to arrive at this conclusion, and one would be given an answer based on prioritization of life-threatening cases, but that’s not the whole story. The story is also about profits, and capacity, and yes, nurses, very few of them in the ER that day, doing the labors of Hercules.

The nurse who checked in on my parents from time to time was from Nigeria, and said that she’d had to send her children back there to be taken care of by their grandmother because having them live here and paying for child care was too expensive on her wages. I’d just heard an NPR story about African nurses who need to work abroad for convertible currencies because of their countries’ debts to the international banking system. Many of the nurses at Alta Bates seemed to have been recruited from other countries for similar reasons.

My mother made sure that she told the doctors the patient had previously suffered from adverse reactions to drugs in the narcotic/opiate category and that he should not be given such drugs, which was duly noted in the record. However, the first night my father was in the hospital the on-call neurosurgeon wrote a prescription for a morphine patch anyhow, possibly because he’d neglected to read the history. A nurse caught the mistake before the patch was used.

Those of us who are lucky enough to be seldom ill might imagine that if we go to the hospital “our own doctor” will be monitoring our care. No such luck. These days there’s a specialty called “hospitalist,” doctors who do nothing but care for patients in the hospital under the hospital’s management. Other specialists, for example the errant neurosurgeon, are also selected by the hospital, not by “your own doctor” (though my parents’ particular very experienced outside primary care physician is not shy about putting in his own opinion if he’s asked and thinks he should). Even Kaiser has now adopted the hospitalist model.

But it’s the nurses who are the glue that’s holding the whole shaky system together at this point. They’re vastly, dramatically overworked, but by and large they still seem to care about doing a good job. They do read the patient’s charts, almost all the time. Most nurses are efficient, intelligent and kind, though many other kinds of medical personnel these days seem to have only one or two of these three traits.

And it’s the nurses’ union that has consistently fought for decent working conditions and staffing models that make it possible for them to do their best against all odds. The health care industry, which includes the insurance industry, is sucking profit out of the medical economy instead of spending it on patient care. Health care statistics in the United States are not improving—they’re getting worse, as compared with all sorts of other countries, for example Canada. It doesn’t matter what kind of insurance you have, either. Even people like my father who have the very best insurance spend hours on gurneys being cared for in hospitals by nurses who have too many patients and are paid too little.

Nurses are currently worried that a pending National Labor Relations Board decision could end up denying many nurses their right to organize because they’re “supervisors.” It’s true that increasingly key decisions about patient care are being made by nurses because they’re the last functional part of the damaged health care system, but they still need their union to back them up when they insist on a rational workplace.

All of us need to work as hard as we can to remind voters of this incident, as reported by the Guardian last year: “‘Pay no attention to those voices over there,’ Schwarzenegger told a conference as it was disrupted by a group of nurses protesting against him. ‘They are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento [California’s capital] because I kick their butt.’”

Almost all of us are indeed part of a special interest group: “Future Patients of America.” Sooner or later, most of us will eventually need help from nurses, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to make sure that they’re supported in their efforts to be able to do their best on the job. In this fall’s election, Governor Schwarzenegger needs to be frequently and forcefully reminded that we the voters, as Future Patients, won’t let him kick nurses around anymore.

The office of Oakland Unified School District administrator Randolph Ward has revealed that one of the developers who lost out in the bid to purchase the OUSD Lake Merritt properties was a familiar figure in Lake Merritt development issues: Oakland developer Alan Dones.

Dones was one of two developers who lost out to the joint bid of Terramark of Stamford, Conn., and Urban America of New York City. Providence, Rhode Island-based Gilbane Development Company also submitted a bid.

OUSD officials did not release details of the two losing firms’ development plans for the 8.25 acre parcel that includes the Paul Robeson Administration Building and five schools. Terramark/Urban America is proposing a mixed commercial-housing development that includes at least 1,000 housing units spread across five high-rise towers.

Dones, whose Strategic Urban Development Alliance (SUDA) company is currently completing construction of the Thomas L. Berkley Square project in the Oakland uptown area, signed a highly-publicized and highly-controversial exclusive negotiating agreement with the Peralta Community College District in November of 2004 to put together a development plan for the Peralta Administration building and Laney College properties.

The Peralta and Laney properties are on the opposite side of the Lake Merritt Channel from the OUSD properties.

Under intense lobbying against the development proposal from Laney College faculty, staff, and union representatives, Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris delayed contract negotiations with Dones, and Dones eventually withdrew his proposal.

Similar opposition to the OUSD property sale may be developing, with the Oakland Education Association teachers union calling for a delay in any sale until local control is returned to the Oakland Unified School District.

Incoming OEA president Betty Olsen-Jones said that while the OEA Executive Committee vote against the proposed property sale was not unanimous, it had the “overwhelming support” of committee members.

At least one OUSD trustee has already called for suspension of the negotiations with Terramark/Urban America until outgoing state-appointed administrator Randolph Ward is replaced. Ward announced last week that he is taking the job of Superintendent of the San Diego County schools beginning Aug. 14.

And the proposed sale is expected to get close scrutiny and possible opposition from local environmentalists. Oakland Heritage Alliance president Naomi Schiff recently informed a local parents group in an email that “as Oakland Heritage Alliance wrote to the school district a couple of years ago, be aware that two buildings on the OUSD 2nd Avenue site may be considered cultural resources under [the California Environmental Quality Act], as historic buildings.”

“In general,” Schiff continued, “our organization favors reusing historic buildings rather than demolishing them. The site also adjoins the environmentally sensitive channel between Lake Merritt, which is a National Historic Landmark, and the estuary. Such a project would require a sensitive and creative design.”

And Oakland City Councilmember Pat Kerningham, who represents the district that houses the OUSD Lake Merritt properties, says that she intends to involve the City of Oakland in the process of scrutinizing the proposed sale.

“I, too, am very concerned about both the process and the substance of the proposal to sell the district property for development,” Kerningham emailed the local parents group last week. “In addition to whatever community meetings the District is proposing, I want to let you know that the City of Oakland also will have its own review and approval process, as the City has land use control over all development within its borders, regardless of who owns the property.”

Kerningham continued that “The city’s land use process will focus more on the question of what should be built there, in the event that the decision is made to go forward with a sale to a developer. What happens on this piece of land is obviously very important for the surrounding neighborhoods and also to the nearby parks and trails along the Lake Merritt Channel. I will make sure that there is a meaningful community planning process for the site.”

Meanwhile, the district is moving forward with plans for its own public hearings on the proposed property sale, currently scheduled for July 12, Aug. 16, and Sept. 6.

Board President David Kakishiba expects by July 12 to receive presentations from district staff members on the exact cost of relocating the three schools and two early childhood development centers from the Lake Merritt properties, as well as the cost of relocating the administrative offices.

Public Comment

Jerry Landis (Letters, July 7) is right on when he points out the inefficiencies of artists, professional artists, and professionals fighting over space and housing in Berkeley. So what do you suppose we do about it? Here’s what I’ll do. I don’t have much, but I will give $500 to a group of Berkeley and other local residents who can find a place with reasonable land prices in California (Davis? Mt. Shasta? The Central Valley?) that could serve as an arts community. We will buy this land. I envision a non-profit organization running a tract with cabins, shacks, a group center, and tent sites with rules outlining no permanent residency but self- and foundation-funded tenancy and fellowships. We could limit participation to Bay Area artists. I’d bet you’d get a great mailing list out of this, too. Government land is still inexpensive and grants are available to groups interested in the idea of intentional artistic communities. So, Jerry, here is my $500. I only ask that someone scrawl (with permanent marker) my name on the bench on the patio of this proposed community. Who’s with me?

John Parman

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WHEELCHAIR SEMANTICS

Editors, Daily Planet:

I have been a wheelchair “user” for over 20 years now. I get out of my wheelchair to go to sleep, take a shower, swim, get into automobiles. If I did not have a wheelchair I truly would be “confined.” I would be confined to my bed. Thanks to both Ann and Brian. While some might assert we should lighten up and not take ourselves so seriously I would counter that language and its use or misuse is critical in forming how the public perceives everyone—male, female, black, white, heterosexual, straight, able bodied or disabled. Such terminology as “confined” to a wheelchair is not only inaccurate it is offensive.

Ruthanne Shpiner

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SPIN-IDIOCY

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was taken aback by a couple of recent Daily Planet letters to the editor criticizing Zelda Bronstein’s ideas for economic renewal. The comments of Tom Case, however, win a prize for spin-idiocy. In it he questions the need for an Office of Economic Development. While it is certainly true that Berkeley’s current Economic Development Office is next to worthless, many other cities around the state not only have full-time professionals in their OEDs but often have one employee per business district. The salaries of these professionals are returned to the city manyfold when appropriate businesses move in and when concerns of existing business are monitored and addressed. To state that this is nothing but “more bureaucracy” is no more logical than firing good salespeople to save on salaries.

If you want to do a case study on failed municipal economics there is no better place to start than Tom Bates. His proposal to raise parking fees and solicit national chain stores on Telegraph Avenue belies a wholesale lack of business and economic sense. It should come as no surprise that the city has experienced double-digit declines in business revenues since Bates became mayor. His willingness to cut fire and police services, reduce parking, and raise every possible fee or tax, while spending millions to subsidize real-estate developers is a recipe for disaster. Imaging what Fourth Street will look like with no parking and empty storefronts, a scenario that will come to pass if Brennan’s and that area’s parking give way to the huge and ugly apartment blocks Tom Bates supports.

There’s no question in my mind that Berkeley needs a mayor who understands business and economics and Bronstein is the only viable candidate in that department.

John Felix

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GAIA SAGA

Editors, Daily Planet:

I’ve been wading through the volumes of detail in Richard Brenneman’s article on Gaia Building cultural uses. Not for the first time in reading his work, it is hard to get at the key issues before nodding off.

But they seem to boil down to two, maybe three: fire safety rules, noise, and sometimes unruly and hard-to-manage crowds, including wannabe participants excluded—probably in turn because of fire regulations. These last issues seem more than a little reminiscent of similar problems long rampant at fraternity parties near the UC campus, and frequently lubricated or exacerbated by alcohol. Fire matters I will leave to the fire authorities. I suspect the noise and hard-to-manage crowds go together, and that as long as Anna’s Jazz Island is expected to coexist with rock concerts and parties featuring highly amplified music, no amount of sound-proofing could hope to prevent a parade of problems for De Leon’s business and probably for residents of the building as well.

Of course I also have to wonder if city officials are loathe to rain on the parades of promoters with business ties to Patrick Kennedy and family ties to city officials.

It seems to me that the kind of use made by the Berkeley Marsh is ideal. Certainly cultural by any definition, not unduly noisy. Not infrequently, people leave a Marsh performance and stop in at Anna’s for awhile afterwards. Maybe the Marsh doesn’t yet have enough of a following to use the space more consistently, but this seems like the direction to aim for. I for one can hardly wait to see in Berkeley more performers featured at the Marsh’s SF location. Meantime, I think the loud parties and rock concerts should be out no matter how well connected their promoters are.

Donna Mickleson

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CLEAN MONEY

Editors, Daily Planet:

Tonight, Tuesday July 11, the Berkeley City Council will once again take up the issue of whether it will refer the “Clean Money” proposal to the people, and place the question on the November ballot.

The League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville strongly supports the proposal, which would provide for public financing of election campaigns for Berkeley Mayor and City Council.

Berkeley’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission recommended, by an overwhelming vote of 7 to 1, to send the proposal to the City Council with a strong recommendation of passage and placement on the ballot for the vote of the people.

At the last council meeting, an apparent lapse in understanding of a parliamentary procedure caused a split in the vote, with four councilmembers voting to place the measure on the November ballot, two voting in opposition, and three abstaining.

The proposal will once again be before the City Council tonight (Tuesday), and because of time deadlines the council must pass it tonight or it is dead for at least two more years (the measure is a City Charter amendment, and thus must come before the citizenry at general elections). This provides a chance for the abstaining officials (Mayor Bates and Councilmembers Anderson and Maio) to commit one way or another on the question, rather than declining to reveal their point of view by abstaining (effectively, a “no” vote).

The League of Women Voters urges all supporters of clean elections, where the money for campaigning comes from the people rather than from the lobbyists and election-time “friends” of elected officials, to immediately contact the mayor’s office and their councilmember, to tell them to vote to put the measure on the fall ballot—no abstentions, just a commitment to yes or no, up or down.

If you can, please come out tonight to show your support of the concept.

An initiative has qualified to place the question on the state ballot in November, providing public financing for state campaigns. With evidence of bias in favor of campaign contributors all around us, the time is ripe to seize the moment and pass legislation at the state and Berkeley levels.

Sherry Smith

League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville

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MORE ON CLEAN MONEY

Editors, Daily Planet:

I wish to concur with Sam Ferguson’s excellent July 7 letter insisting that all nine Berkeley City Councilmembers explicitly vote their position—rather than abstain—on a proposed “clean money” campaign reform ballot measure for Berkeley candidate elections. The City Council will likely decide this issue today (Tuesday).

It is imperative that the City Council provide Berkeley’s voters with the democratic opportunity to vote yes or no on this critical and groundbreaking issue rather than the council itself deciding.

If the council is allowing Berkeley citizens an opportunity to vote yes or no on an impeachment ballot measure, then the council should extend to Berkeley citizens the same opportunity to vote up or down on public financing of candidate elections.

Please permit Berkeley’s voters, themselves, to decide this important issue on Nov. 7.

Chris Kavanagh

•

IN DEFENSE OF BRONSTEIN

Editors, Daily Planet:

I can’t sit back and let Planning Commissioner Harry Pollack run down former Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein as unfriendly to business, and not place his comments in perspective. Which businesses are you talking about, Harry? When I was on the Planning Commission I saw Ms. Bronstein work hard to bring proposals before the commission in support of industrial and artisan businesses. I also saw Mr. Pollack work hard to undercut that effort, and to prevent it from even being discussed. It was Pollack who was anti-business.

As an industrial business owner myself, I know that Bronstein is far from trying “to impose her personal views on neighborhoods.” She is guilty only of being one of the very few people in city government who has listened to the needs of the industrial business community, and who has tried to help. Pollack on the other hand supports the commercialization of the industrial zones in West Berkeley, and doesn’t appear to care that in many cases that means driving industrial businesses out of town. Harry, you may not consider us important, but we think we are. Push industries, artisans, and artists out of town and the character of the city is changed. Is that’s what you want? Bronstein, to the contrary, has supported our struggle to stay in town, and has argued that new West Berkeley shopping centers would draw business away from the existing commercial zones, which are already badly struggling.

Ms. Bronstein was not “leading” the struggle over the Berkeley Bowl; it was engaged in by many people living or working in the neighborhood, both businesses and residents, and we remain very concerned about the impact that 50,000 cars per week will have on us. Twenty-seven local industrial, retail, recycling, art and artisan businesses employing hundreds of people joined together to request that the EIR also study the economic impacts of this project on local businesses, but this was never done. Pollack blames Bronstein for the time-consuming planning process for the Bowl. To the contrary, the city manager writes, “The unusual duration is due in part to the city’s decision, relatively late in the process, to prepare an EIR, and also to oversights and errors by the applicant’s traffic consultant and the city’s environmental consultant, which necessitated recirculation of the EIR and the extension of the review period….” Bronstein only joined in this experiment we call democracy. Pollack apparently would prefer everything planned quickly and quietly by developers, city staff, and commissioners, and get rid of the messy “delays” of citizen participation.

Yes, Ms. Bronstein does not live or work in West Berkeley. But just for the record, Harry, you don’t have to live or work in our neighborhood to support the retention of industrial and artisan businesses. We welcome the support of all people, including you. How about it, Harry? Will you finally turn around and support our businesses? Will you listen to the neighborhood?

Want to know how Gainesville, Florida, protects neighborhood residents during college football games? How Columbus, Ohio handles the problem of trash in neighborhoods near the Ohio State campus? How Colorado State University in Fort Collins responds to calls about off-campus student behavior problems? Or how police in Boulder, Colorado and Corvallis, Oregon handle disruptive student parties? So did we. That’s why we went to the conference on “Best Practices in Building University/City Relations” last month in Colorado. What we learned there kept our eyes wide open and our pens scratching notes as fast as we could write. We learned that cities across the United States and Canada handle these problems effectively and efficiently every day—in contrast to the typical inaction of our own city officials and UC Berkeley.

Game Day in Gainesville

Just about everybody loves football in Gainesville, where the University of Florida Gators’ stadium seats 90,000 spectators. The stadium is adjacent to residential neighborhoods, just like Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, but in Gainesville, the city takes the safety and comfort of its residents seriously. On game days, when the population of the town swells to near double, the university pays for 40 extra on-duty police officers who patrol the neighborhoods near the stadium. These officers aggressively ticket any parking and traffic violations, and watch for litter, alcohol, and noise violations. They are empowered to block off residential streets with patrol cars, to protect neighborhoods.

Satellite parking lots and shuttle busses are utilized to limit cars coming into town, and they are heavily used because they are convenient and are promoted with all ticket sales. The University of Florida recognizes that night games impose significant additional burdens on residents, so it limits these games to only two per year. There are no non-university football games or special events held at the stadium. And the university hires a crew to clean up after every game to guarantee that “by 10 a.m. the next day the town is spotless.”

When we described how Berkeley handles football games, representatives from Gainesville found it difficult to believe us. In fact, as we described Berkeley’s policies on many issues during the three-day conference, the typical reaction was skepticism or outright disbelief. This shows how far out of step with the rest of the country Berkeley’s policies are in handling university problems.

“Adopt-a-Street” and “The Great Sofa Roundup”

As is true in many college towns, the student residential areas near Ohio State University were frequently marred by litter, graffiti, and other public nuisances. That is, until Sean McLaughlin developed a program to encourage student organizations to “adopt” streets in the off-campus neighborhoods. Now, OSU students cooperate to maintain their streets and improve the neighborhood quality of life. We believe that many residents of Berkeley’s Southside—who just experienced a massive trashing of their neighborhood by departing student tenants—would welcome a similar program and attitude.

When we showed conference participants photos of the large piles of discarded furniture and garbage lining our streets—photos taken almost a month after the students had departed—can you guess what their reaction was? They couldn’t believe it. They had never let things get this bad in their own cities. CSU at Fort Collins has a program called “The Great Sofa Roundup.” During that event, everyone is invited to come to a central location and either drop off used furniture, or take some of it to furnish their new place. Items in any condition are accepted; furniture too damaged to be reused is taken to the dump. It’s the ultimate recycling program, and it’s a win-win solution for the city, the neighbors, and the students.

Taming disruptive parties

In many university towns, the student code of conduct applies to students living off campus as well as on campus. And many cities have enacted noise, parking, and trash ordinances which keep off-campus housing quiet and clean.

In Syracuse, New York, the city enacted a “Nuisance Party Ordinance,” the violation of which results in a fine up to $500, and/or imprisonment of up to 15 days. Significantly, the police do not need a complaint from a citizen to act; rather, a citation may be issued if the police observe disorderly conduct, unlawful possession of an open container, furnishing alcohol to a minor, possession of alcohol by a minor, littering, obstructive parking, unlawfully loud noise, or property damage. Some cities in Colorado impose even stiffer fines—up to $1,000 for a first violation of a noise or public nuisance ordinance. Students are expected to know the laws, and warnings are not issued to first-time offenders.

Imagine, if just a few of these laws had been in place in Berkeley, it wouldn’t have taken over 20 years and a trip to small claims court by 12 neighbors to shut down the notorious UC Chateau Co-op.

University expansion and construction

Our city has endured the continual expansion of the UC Berkeley campus ever since its inception in 1868, from the original 160 acres to over 1200. UC Berkeley continues to grab more and more office space and other institutional space throughout the city. Other universities have established healthier relationships with their host communities. University of Arizona at Tucson and the University of Colorado at Boulder both have fixed campus boundaries; the Boulder campus has not expanded in 50 years. Boundaries help city officials anticipate and fund their own infrastructure needs, help residents decide where to put down roots, and help businesses plan where to locate.

Most universities abide by the land use regulations and construction codes established by their communities. The University of Arizona is currently doing major construction on campus adjacent to an established neighborhood. For this project and all others, their neighborhood liaison explained, they have a strict and enforceable construction code of conduct—and neighborhood residents receive prompt assistance if there are any violations.

A bureaucratic miracle

One of the main issues citizens contend with in college towns is finding out where to get help with specific problems. To address this difficulty, Anne Hudgens, the executive director for campus life at CSU Fort Collins, instituted a system in which the person on her staff who receives an initial request for assistance from a citizen must personally find the answer to their question, and call the person back to give them the information. Thus, the citizen makes only one call and does not get bounced around from department to department. Ms. Hudgens feels that it is important to respect the members of the community, and not waste their time. She claims that her system is working very well: there is greater accountability on her staff, and the public loves it. Imagine that!

City-university liaisons

Most of the universities represented at the conference have some type of campus/city coordinator, who handles citizen complaints. To guarantee his or her effectiveness in representing the public, this liaison operates independently of any city or university department. Notably, this is not considered a “public relations” job, but is a substantive and empowered position. This arrangement provides the public with a direct channel to handle everyday problems as well as long-term concerns. In Fort Collins, this position is jointly funded by the university and the city. Many universities consider this their single most important tool to enhance their interaction with residents.

What about Berkeley?

Last year, UC Berkeley established a chancellor’s task force to work on problems related to student alcohol abuse in the Southside. Their work has been productive, but it is limited to the impacts of student parties; the task force has no plans to address the other serious problems that residents face. But there is reason for hope—several representatives of the city and UC Berkeley attended the conference with us—and if they came away with the volumes of information, good ideas, and contacts we collected, we should soon see some major improvements in our own backyard!

The University of California represents itself as a great university, dedicated to public service. It is long past time that they dedicated themselves to serving the public right here in the community we all share: Berkeley.

Doug Buckwald and Anne Wagley presented their program, “Bear Territory: From Cub to Grizzly,” at the recent university/city relations conference sponsored by Colorado State University and the City of Fort Collins, Colorado.

Because you can easily see 10-story buildings, large condo projects and several giant transit villages in the pipeline, it hardly seems that large-scale real estate development in Berkeley needs a boost. Yet the Planning Department, along with the mayor and his followers on the City Council, has drafted a new landmark ordinance that will be presented to the City Council. The bureaucratic language crafted by our local Machiavellis in the city attorney’s office—likely still spinning the regs as I write—will make you run up to Tilden for a breath of clean air, vowing you will never come within earshot of City Hall again.

But the deal, folks, is that the new “compromise” Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO) adroitly circumvents the old LPO, fought for over a generation ago as part of neighborhood preservation. Local activists achieved this after “boxes made of ticky tacky” popped up over much of Berkeley. Now, via a reasonable-seeming provision, the new ordinance puts citizen landmarkers back where they started from—out of sight. But you must bear with me and wade through, um, ticky-tacky City Hall-speak in order to see my point.

The finely crafted loophole is the preemptive exemption/entitlement: an advance request for determination (RFD) to find if a given property has historic merit. A property owner or his agent can do this before any project is even proposed, hiring their own historic consultant from a list approved by the Planning Department. The consultant then submits an opinion to Planning, one that the owner can live with, to wit: this property is not a landmark. If Planning agrees—and who in recent memory recalls Planning disagreeing with a developer; they get their fees, ahem, from the same developers—they endorse the report and recommend that the Landmarks Commission (LPC) concur with the decision of “no historical features.”

Now I was taught in fourth grade civics that, theoretically, the LPC could disagree with Planning. Of course, I was also taught that Congress was not supposed to play dead toward the president. My civics teacher failed to mention the power of the military-industrial complex or the oil megacorps in DC. And they certainly didn’t bring up the influence of large-scale developers on local politicians and bureaucrats, even liberal ones who call for Bush’s impeachment while greasing the skids locally for faster demolitions.

Back to the RFD saying “no history here,” which is now in the hands of the LPC. With a certified report from an expert endorsed by Planning, what are the odds that the LPC , who serve at the pleasure of the majority pro-developer council, will challenge the point? Furthermore, LPC’s members can be removed at will, as Patti Dacey was recently. She made the mistake of casting a swing vote that criticized an illegal demolition in West Berkeley, an area developers claim as their new playground.

My civics teacher reminds me that citizens still have a theoretical chance of challenging the RFD. To quote George W.’s father: “there must be a level playing field.” With a time-frame that is greatly curtailed, using the Permit Streamlining Act as an excuse, and facing an arcane language to decipher, citizens and neighbors will be playing serious catch-up ball with a ticking clock.

So let’s pull together and stop this preemptive exemption, especially the two-year-plus contraction carte blanche, tailored for unchallenged demolitions. Why in the world does the LPC need to be “reined in?” They have never been the anti-developer zealots who make good copy for the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Express’ standard lampoons of Berkeley’s lefty nuts. They as often as not lean over backwards to accommodate real estate speculators and their retinue of high-price lawyers and architects.

But, aha! They have shown some independence and occasionally functioned as a court of last resort for citizens and neighbors. Fighting city hall and developers even 5 percent of the time must have been too much for corporate and city hall types, trained in the sixth year of the Bush to expect getting their way 100 percent. Taking a page from Karl Rove, they punish those who, even timidly, don’t follow orders. This new LPO preemptive exemption clause will, subtly but definitively, align the LPC even more than it already is with the developer-Planning complex. It will no longer be even occasionally user friendly, as it is now, for the people. Its original purpose, an independent forum for citizens to have input into their neighborhood and their city, will be lost and very hard to retrieve.

May I second Brian Hill’s semantic quibble over the phrase “confined to a wheelchair” used more than once by Susan Parker. A wheelchair is not an obstacle, it is a tool, and a very useful one if you can’t walk. Like Brian and Ralph, I’m good and crippled, but the chair isn’t the problem, it’s part of the solution, and I wish the Daily Planet wouldn’t use language implying otherwise.

Try “wheelchair user,” or “uses a wheelchair.” That’s not so hard, is it?

Ann Sieck

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FEAR OF PECAUT

Editors, Daily Planet:

Christian Pecaut (Daily Planet, July 4) gives us all the data we need to decide the suitability of this mayoral candidate for that office.

Pecaut offers a “Paradigm from California,” and asks: “What does the paradigm prove?”

Lets look at a few of the candidate’s claims:

(1) “Nature and...human behavior are geared for work out well for every” one. Pecaut apparently got to Stanford without reading “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” Nature rewards thrift and abhors lazy consumers. Nature also has many species in which sexual behavior does not “work out well for every” player.

(2) “Protection is supposed to flow...downwards in hierarchies.” Hear the deafening laughter of queen and drone bees. Or read Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life, which notes that Earth is not a hierarchy, but an interdependent network. “Implication?” When the United States enacted Social Security, our personal savings rate dropped to less than one per cent, banks had less to loan to businesspeople, less stuff got made and fewer jobs were created, and we owe a trillion dollars to China and Japan.

(3) The notion of a single, fully knowable, real objective truth defies most current responsible scientific research into the human perceptual system.

(4) “Demand what you want” is a mantra for adolescents, sociopaths, and people with insufficient education to acknowledge we live as community.

Pecaut’s clear philosophical statement allows us to decide with our eyes open. In the words of the great American philosopher Geena Davis, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

David Altschul

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‘PERMANENT COLLECTION’

Editors, Daily Planet:

Regarding Ken Bullock’s June 30 review of Permanent Collection: I, too, came away aware that the author had focused more on characters’ points of view than developing Aristotle’s “dramatic action.” But on the drive home, my wife and I interrupted one another as we examined how the play made us feel and analyzed what the author had to say about how some racial issues stay the same and some evolve. Finally, what we learned from this production of Collection was that the excellent acting put the audience in the characters’ position so well that the dramatic action could go on in a Honda Civic hours after the curtain had fallen.

Paul Heller

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SAD OLD LEFTISTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

A half-century ago, when I had exiled myself from my native California to get a sense of East Coast life in Philadelphia, I dated a girl who was not just an art student, but a member of the Communist Party. Those were heady times, politically and intellectually, and through the intervening decades my political position has drifted between liberal and libertarian. Is it due just to my aging pragmatism that I now find myself looking with some impatience at Berkeley’s sad old leftists, still dragging their tattered red flags behind them?

I asked myself this after reading two items in the Daily Planet of June 27. First, John Curl again warns us that opening West Berkeley to real business (Capitalism!) will drive out artists and artisans because, as he rightly points out, many of them can’t afford the higher rents that would result from competitive use of that area. The question he doesn’t ask is why they should be practicing their arts and crafts in one of the most densely populated and costly cities in the state. Or why the other residents of the city should subsidize their choice to do that, by carrying the tax burden that West Berkeley should share. In the past, artists and craftsfolk formed their communities in rural enclaves where space was cheap and living was easy. Why not now? The hard question is this: do we owe them a livelihood just because they choose to spend their days at pleasant pursuits that the rest of us have to squeeze into hobby time?

Then, in his article on the Arpeggio condo project, Richard Brenneman reports that Councilmember Dona Spring is irked that none of the inclusionary condos available to buyers with limited incomes are on the top floors. “Inclusionary units are supposed to be the same as any others,” she said, “but these units are the inside units that don’t have the views. That’s wrong.” So it’s not enough that those with lower incomes can purchase condos in a new luxury building at reduced (subsidized) prices— they should be entitled to the same views that attract premium buyers. Oh, those poor oppressed masses... Give me a break!

Jerry Landis

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NO BUSINESS SENSE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I thought Tom Bates was doing a lousy job as mayor, especially after he left the city’s taxpayers with most of the cost of University expansion. Then I read Zelda Bronstein’s “A Pro-Business Pro-Berkeley Agenda” (Daily Planet, June 30) and realized that the city’s finances could get worse. Much worse.

It’s clear Ms. Bronstein, as well-meaning as she might be, knows nothing about business, and would move the city further toward financial crisis.

For instance, she declares the importance of keeping auto dealers in Berkeley, then supports locking in the industrial zoning that prevents dealerships from locating near the freeway, their natural setting. She believes she can help solve parking problems by boosting meters to 90 minutes, not understanding that such a move would choke turnover, making parking problems worse.

Bronstein says we need to debunk the myth that Berkeley industry is dead. No one is saying it’s dead. What people are saying is that new growth in manufacturing in Berkeley is practically dead, and pretending otherwise is hallucinatory. She believes that “a rich array of light industry, artists and artisans” can provide the new growth in sales tax the city needs to avoid big budget cuts. Does anybody else truly believe that fantasy?

She wants to revive the Office of Economic Development. That’s all we need—more bureacracy.

Why can’t somebody run for mayor that will survey the needs of business and potential businesses in Berkeley, and adjust policies to attract them? I feel sure the top priority will be cutting bureaucratic red tape, not adding more of it.

Next time the city asks for property or parcel tax hikes, remember that our representatives are doing next to nothing to bring in business revenue.

Tom Case

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CANDIDATE’S RESPONSE

Editors, Daily Planet:

The Swiftboating of John Kerry during the last presidential election had an important lesson: Respond to smears in a timely and forceful manner. It is with that lesson in mind that I reply to Harry Pollack’s attack (letters, July 4) on my “Pro-Business, Pro-Berkeley Agenda” commentary. Pollack asserts that my actions, unlike my words, show that I am “anti-business” and anti- neighborhood.

Actions do speak louder than words. Indeed, my actions refute Pollack’s claims, which in almost every instance grossly misrepresent my record. He does get two things right: As he states, I chaired the Planning Commission for two years (2002-2004) and was president of the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association (TONA). What follows are some of the facts he distorted or simply ignored.

While on the Planning Commission for nearly seven years, I co-chaired the commission subcommittee that oversaw downtown streetscape improvements. In recognition of that work, I received the Downtown Berkeley Association’s 1998 President’s Award “for exceptional leadership and consensus building.” Joining with merchants and city staff, I helped start the Main Street Alliance in support of Berkeley’s independent, locally owned and operated businesses. I initiated and then helped guide the community-based planning process that led to the city’s first new General Plan in 25 years. I drafted the plan’s Economic Development Element, which was adopted in 2002 with only minor revisions by the City Council. I teamed up with planning commissioners Gene Poschman and John Curl to present the Planning Commission with a detailed proposal protecting West Berkeley artists and industry. And I helped convene and then served on the UC Hotel/ Conference Center Citizens Advisory Group, whose recommendations have been praised by the project’s developer.

In West Berkeley, I’ve worked with the Traffic and Safety Coalition (TASC), composed of West Berkeley businesses and residents, for a neighborhood-friendly Berkeley Bowl. Thanks to TASC, an environmental impact report was done for the new store, which will be twice as large as the existing Bowl and generate 50,000 vehicle trips a week.

Finally, contrary to Pollack’s claim, TONA and I welcomed La Farine Bakery onto Solano Avenue. We did ask La Farine and city officials to respect the Solano Avenue Commercial Ordinance, which promotes a diverse, neighborhood-serving business district. (I trust that Pollack, a lawyer, and the mayoral candidate he’s endorsed, the incumbent, think it’s a good idea to follow the law.)

Zelda Bronstein

•

RECONSIDER, PLEASE

Editors, Daily Planet:

If politicians won’t work for you, make them pay for it! This week the Berkeley City Council declined to place a measure on the November ballot to publicly finance our elections for mayor and City Council. They ignored the fact that the Berkeley Fair Campaign Practices Commission (FCPC) appointed by them had just voted overwhelmingly in favor of the measure. They ignored the fact that there will be a similar (but not anywhere near as good) measure on the statewide ballot this fall. They ignored their own certain knowledge that corporations and developers control Congress and virtually every state and local elected body. They ignored the fact that publicly financed elections benefit everyone running for office, by giving candidates complete freedom to talk to and work with their constituents rather than raising money.

The United States is the only industrial nation that allows legalized bribery in the form of “campaign contributions.” That’s why we had Enron, it’s why we are paying triple for our energy bills compared to seven years ago, it’s why our taxes go to war and corporate subsidies, and it’s why we have developers who run roughshod over our citizens’ wishes and city plans whenever they feel the need to make a buck. It’s why the Legislature, and even our own City Council, go along with whatever the wealthy and powerful want.

You can do something to stop this evil system. Don’t support candidates who don’t work for you! If your elected officials won’t vote to eliminate legalized bribery, then don’t vote for them, and don’t give them money! Make them pay for their own campaign out of their own pocket.

Take this pledge now: Raise your right hand and read aloud, “I pledge to make politicians pay. I will not donate money to any candidate who does not work for me. I will not give my money to anyone who does not support a civilized system of publicly financed elections.”

Then call, write or e-mail your mayor and councilmember to tell to reconsider next week, or else pay for their own election.

Bob Marsh

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CLEAN ELECTIONS

Editors, Daily Planet:

The heading of the June 30 article “Council Rejects ‘Clean Money’ Measure, Adopts New Budget” is a tad misleading. Twice as many councilmembers voted for the clean elections (Bates, Moore, Spring and Worthington) than opposed it (Capitelli and Olds), indicating it wasn’t rejected. The problem is the council simply didn’t decide, because three members hadn’t made up their minds and abstained from the issue.

This indicates that the council need revisit the idea. It does a disservice to the voters of Berkeley when the legislative process is derailed by withholding votes through abstention. There are three weeks left to get clean elections on the ballot, and decision time has arrived. If the abstaining members oppose clean elections in Berkeley, I ask them to say so, affirmatively, and decide on the issue by voting no. But, if they are truly for clean elections, as several have indicated both publicly and privately; if they stand with the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club and the Fair Campaign Practices Commission; if they believe in better, participatory, accessible local government; if they recognize that your political worth is not tied to your net worth, I ask them to vote to place clean elections on the November ballot at the July 11 City Council meeting.

The time is right for clean elections in Berkeley. While Measure H failed to garner enough support, much in 2006 is different. The League of Women Voters is now an active member of our coalition. The city is in better financial condition than it was in 2004. The scarcity of local ballot initiatives will allow voters to concentrate and consider this issue on its merits. And, most importantly, the state clean money efforts have gained tremendous momentum, both increasing voter awareness of clean money, and providing an opportunity to seize the day by simultaneously cleaning up California (Yes on 89!) and cleaning up Berkeley.

We sent the members of the City Council to office to make decisions. It’s time to make a decision. Are you for or against clean elections?

Sam Ferguson

Chair, Berkeley Clean Elections Coalition

•

CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

Editors, Daily Planet:

So Tom Bates supported public financing for the mayor’s race when he was campaigning but now opposes it? He’s concerned that 600 people would have to give $5. And the majority of the City Council is also opposed.

Could the Daily Planet list the amount of contributions each candidate collected in the last race and who the big contributors were?

Nancy Ward

•

CALDECOTT TUNNEL

Editors, Daily Planet:

Regarding “More Cars for Berkeley with New Caldecott Tunnel” (Daily Planet, July 4): I have enormous respect and admiration for Roy Nakadegawa, who has throughout his professional career as a transportation engineer espoused and advocated environmentally-friendly solutions, not least as an elected member of the boards of directors of, first, AC Transit and then BART. But I feel that he has got the issue of the fourth Caldecott Tunnel wrong. Let me explain while also stating that I am not enthusiastic about building this project.

The congestion that the new tunnel is intended to alleviate is that experienced by the counter commute; i.e., east to the suburbs in the morning and west in the afternoon. At present, this traffic has available only one tunnel (two lanes), and backs up a mile or more for several hours each weekday. The major commute (westward in the morning, eastward in the afternoon) is allocated four lanes in two tunnels. The fourth tunnel would add two more lanes to the counter-commute direction, while the highway capacity for the major commute direction—and therefore traffic volume—would not change.

Mr. Nakadegawa states that there “needs to be development in the east as dense as destinations in San Francisco.” Present conditions are not likely to attract large numbers of additional workers from west of the Berkeley Hills to central Contra Costa County; it would require the capacity of two more lanes on Highway 24, which the fourth tunnel would provide, to serve a much denser job concentration. Without the fourth tunnel, there would be reluctance by developers to build to higher work-place densities in and around Walnut Creek and Concord.

My ambivalence about the fourth tunnel stems from the feeling that congestion, while bad for air quality and fuel consumption, serves to convince some travelers to switch to transit, and that this project would result in some loss of BART passengers going in the counter-commute direction. In the evening this probably includes persons heading to San Francisco for dinner, theater, etc., who prefer BART to the double challenge of the Caldecott Tunnel and the Bay Bridge. Also, I am somewhat skeptical about the likelihood that dense development will occur in an era in which it is often stopped by local opposition.

This is the week when, in between barbecues and fireworks, we sometimes spare a few thoughts about our founding dead white guys. Guys like Thomas Jefferson, who’s had a hard run recently.

Last year this time, Jefferson’s name almost fell off a Berkeley school. Before the Berkeley School Board narrowly blocked them, students, families, and staff of Jefferson Elementary School voted to disassociate themselves from the old slaveholder.

In Los Angeles, a Jefferson High School has become a closely-watched shorthand for all inner-city schools’ burdens: underfunding, overcrowding, underachievement, and racial brawling.

The first of these tales out of school speaks to Jefferson’s failings; the second to our own.

Our third president was a famous bundle of contradictions. In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson “crafted the most inspiring egalitarian promise in modern history while living his entire life among 200 slaves,” wrote prominent biographer Joseph J. Ellis in American Sphinx.

Jefferson was a wealthy planter who died virtually bankrupt. A master organizer of nations who crammed an estate with disorganized clutter. A Deist—like other prominent founders, a dissenter from organized religion—who led a society animated by religious fervor.

But although Jefferson has plenty to answer for, we shouldn’t understate his, and his fellow rebels’, radical achievement in establishing a nation pledged to the Declaration’s principles:

that all men are created equal, that they are endowed...with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ... That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government...to effect their safety and happiness.

Of course, it took centuries to invest those noble words about equality and unalienable rights with real meaning. We don’t even know yet how many centuries. When our nation really lives up to Jefferson’s democratic ideals, we’ll know.

Jefferson didn’t originate these principles: Natural rights were in the air of his Enlightenment 18th century. He even copped the general phrasing from George Mason, an uncompromising freethinker who was sort of Jefferson’s Jefferson. Mason’s remarkable Virginia Declaration of Rights also prefigured much of the eventual U.S. Bill of Rights.

But Jefferson made it all sing. He also added an extended denunciation of the slave trade—which the Continental Congress removed from the final Declaration, to appease Georgia and South Carolina.

And Jefferson and company did something genuinely new in declaring that their new nation’s government should bow to human happiness, rather than the reverse. Official utterances in those days were all about obligations upward, to crown and heaven: God save the King. I pledge allegiance to the Flag...one nation under God.

Sorry, that last bit of backsliding wouldn’t be drafted until 1892, by a Socialist. Congress wouldn’t drag in God until 1954.

And backsliding was on my mind this July 4, because we’re back in the yoke of old and regressive ideas. Jefferson’s most cherished values are in retreat, along with him, these 230 years later: Restraints on the power of absolute rulers named George. The flourishing of reason. The legitimacy of scientific evidence. Secularism. Free immigration. The cultivation of public education. Perhaps the whole Enlightenment project itself.

Especially endangered is the pursuit of happiness. The hornet’s nest of reaction and religious zeal that’s stung at Jefferson’s America for the last generation has been consistent about precisely one thing: They want to save us all from our happiness.

Today’s oppressors would save gay Americans from enjoying the loving marriages they themselves can’t achieve. (And they have the nerve to call their lobbies “Liberty Institute” and “Defense of Marriage.”) They’ve long insisted on dictating which stimulants we may consume. Now they would also dictate just what we may read, write, say, and even believe—and what official abuses and atrocities we may know.

They would free our children from the adequately funded public education that leads to a happy, productive life. They would free us all from the happiness of a secure, dignified retirement.

The Tories who now run Congress—descendants of the slaveholding planter elite that Jefferson and Mason tried to destroy from within—even refused to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.

Their moralistic fervor has a common result: promoting isolation and unhappiness. Just as the original Puritans transformed Massachusetts from a sanctuary into an oppressive colony of witch-burners, modern-day Puritans’ good intentions have the odd result of serving the Devil.

So how are we doing on happiness? Apparently, not so well. In the 2005 World Values Survey—a fascinating international poll—the U.S. ranked only 15th in respondents’ self-declared happiness. Beating us were several Latin American countries with more sunshine than transparent government (corrupt, war-ravaged Colombia was No. 8) and northern democracies with better social policy than weather (Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Canada).

Five of the same northerly democracies helped edge us to No. 10 in last year’s U.N. Human Development Index—an annual ranking of countries’ “livability” based on objective criteria like life expectancy, literacy, educational enrollment, and per capita income.

The cool northern societies that beat us in both subjective and objective measures of well-being share an organizing principle: Limit the economic advantages of those at the top, through progressive taxation and generous income supports; but maximize the freedom that those on the bottom have to determine their own lifestyles, expressions, and beliefs. This model is too pragmatic to even be summarized by an ideology—unless you want to call it Jeffersonian.

Meanwhile, Jefferson’s new nation has moved toward a model that one might call Singaporization, after the city-state that combines vigorous capitalism with repressive dictatorship: Maximize the economic prerogatives of those at the top, by compounding soaring executive pay with tax giveaways; minimize the economic, political, and behavioral freedoms of those on the bottom.

Singapore, which some American wag once dubbed a “fascist Disneyland,” is infamous for imprisoning political dissidents, fining gum-chewers, and caning petty vandals. How far are we from that? Several U.S. employers will now fire you for smoking, or for even refusing a random tobacco test. And you can bet that Wal-Mart, now America’s largest employer, will fire you for trying to organize a union.

Singapore’s mix of economic openness and political control is an explicit model for the dictators running nearby China. So Jefferson’s heirs, and the emerging superpower that now makes most of our stuff, are converging on a model Jefferson would abhor.

While lecturing blue states about “defending marriage,” much of Dixie has a divorce rate 50 percent higher than the national average. Several other Southern social indicators don’t look much better. The rest of us are largely innocent victims, caught in the crossfire of the South’s own endless cycle of moral scolding and moral failure. Like its distinguished son Jefferson, the nation’s most eloquent region has never quite gotten itself under control or lived up to its own ideals.

WWJD (What would Jefferson do) about a nation backsliding into inequality and “monkish ignorance and superstition"? That last phrase comes from Jefferson’s letter to the Declaration of Independence’s 50th anniversary celebration. After acknowledging the world’s unfree and unhappy, he hopefully addressed their prospects:

All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately… .

Each July 4, Jefferson hoped, would “forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.” That was his last public statement. Remarkably, he and fellow founder John Adams both became dead white guys on July 4, 1826.

Last year while making the rounds at various budget-related events, Mayor Bates made a point of asking the community to help prioritize how City of Berkeley funds should be spent. Needless to say, the activities presented to choose among were skewed towards validating the “usual suspects” favored by the mayor, which one supposes was the reason for the survey to begin with. All the same, residents managed to sift down to the lower reaches of the mayor’s list to find public safety (police and fire services), which they identified as their overall top priority. Despite making their priorities clear, the community has been largely ignored by the City Council.

This year the city’s actual revenues were more than $7 million above projections. With that amount of unexpected revenues, there is simply no excuse for undercutting public safety. Yet infuriatingly, the City Council continues to put the public at risk by leaving fire stations unmanned 286 days out of 330 under so-called “Flexible Deployment.” Why are we back at square one insisting that the City Council fund public safety first?

Here are some pertinent aspects of the problem:

• Fire season was officially declared as of Monday, June 12.

• The heavy, late rains this year have yielded abnormally abundant fuels in City Council Districts 5, 6, 7 and 8.

• Every precaution must be taken to avoid the devastation of another firestorm.

• Engine companies were closed for 286 (24-hour periods) out of 330 days.

• In council Districts 1, 5, 6, 7 and 8, whenever an engine company is closed under Flexible Deployment, its fire station is unmanned and closed for that 24 hour period.

• Four of Berkeley’s seven fire stations (3, 4, 6 and 7) are left unmanned when that station’s engine company is closed under the Flexible Deployment program.

• Property insurance rates are likely to increase as insurers learn that the city continues to take resources from the Fire Department.

Already this fire season, the cities of Livermore, Napa and Antioch have had wildfires. Tragically, a residential fire in Richmond claimed the lives of three children due to a delay in the arrival of emergency personnel because of inadequate staffing (see San Francisco Chronicle, June 12).

No city ever wants to experience disasters. Having a prepared Fire Department with adequate resources is the best way to reduce loss of life and property. Fires and other life threatening emergencies will continue to occur in our city, regardless of budget concerns or staffing levels.

The City Council needs to stop playing Russian roulette with our safety and reject the false security of the Flexible Deployment program. It shouldn’t take a disaster to make the council realize that public safety benefits everyone.

Marie Bowman is a member of Berkeleyans Against Soaring Taxes (BASTA).

Columns

Many progressives view the November mid-term elections as a referendum on the presidency of George Bush and the ineptitude of his rubber-stamp Republican Congress.

Voters have an opportunity to express their views on the war in Iraq, the economy, and immigration. Yet lurking behind these serious problems is an issue that most Americans are only vaguely aware of: Bush’s ruthless drive to increase the power of the presidency.

His plan to move the United States away from a system with three equally powerful branches of government—the executive, legislative, and judicial—and replace them with an omnipotent, “unitary,” president. The critical issue to be decided on Nov. 7 is whether or not Congress will stand up to Dictator Dubya.

In a May interview in the Washington Post, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave some indication of what Democrats plan to do if they take back control of the House in the November elections. She said that during their first week in power Dems “would raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls.”

Pelosi went on to promise “a series of investigations of the Bush administration” including their use of intelligence data to justify the invasion of Iraq. It is the threat of these investigations that has riled Republicans. They don’t want the public made aware of Bush’s power grab. They don’t want average Americans to comprehend that Dubya has become a greater threat to democracy than the terrorists he frequently warns us about.

In a June 22 article in the New York Review of Books, veteran political reporter Elizabeth Drew described the elements of administration’s design for an omnipotent presidency. The first is the widespread use of the “signing statement.” President Bush has amended more than 750 laws by attaching a statement saying that because, in his opinion, the law in question impinges on the power of the presidency, he considers it “advisory in nature.”

In other words, George Bush doesn’t veto laws; he signs them in carefully orchestrated photo-ops and later attaches a signing statement indicating that he plans to ignore the provisions in the law he doesn’t agree with.

The fact that Bush consciously subverts the will of Congress is, in itself, the basis for public hearings and national dialogue about his abrogation of the separation of powers. But “signing statements” are just one of the devices that Dubya has used to expand the power of the Presidency.

According to Republicans, since 9/11 the United States has been in a perpetual state of war and this justifies George Bush’s repeated use of his constitutional powers as “commander in chief.” First, the administration created the designation of “enemy combatant” for those captured in Afghanistan. The White House decided that combatants were not to be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or to be accorded the due process rights given to defendants in the United States; most were lodged in Guantanamo or in CIA-administered prisons outside the United States. At the same time, the president decided that it was permissible to torture these detainees in order to determine whether they knew of any plans to attack the United States. The fact that the administration condoned torture influenced the interrogation techniques used in Iraq, resulting in the scandals at Abu Ghraib and other facilities.

Subsequently, Congress passed “the McCain amendment,” which banned cruel, inhuman, or degraded treatment” of POWs. After he signed the McCain amendment, George Bush attached a signing statement: “The executive branch shall construe [the torture provision] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judiciary.” In other words, Bush would do what he thought was best, regardless of the intent of Congress.

In December, the New York Times revealed that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone calls in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Bush justified this both on the basis of his war powers as commander-in-chief and his contention that the FISA act was illegal as it limited the “inherent powers” of the Executive branch. (On June 22, the Times reported that Bush authorized the CIA and Treasury Departments to monitor all flows of funds in and out of the US.)

Since 9/11, George Bush and his closest advisers have seized upon the threat of another terrorist attack as the basis for an unprecedented expansion of presidential powers. A Republican-controlled Congress is unwilling to check this power grab because they are beholden to Bush the politician for much of their financial support.

Thus, Capitol Hill “business as usual” has seen the GOP ignore Dubya’s dictatorial designs. That’s why it is so important that Democrats seize control of one or both wings of Congress in November. Our democratic form of government is at risk and someone needs to do something about it.

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net.

In last week’s column I mentioned that I had been out of the country and that I wouldn’t bore readers with the details of my fabulous vacation. I said I had endured no pathos, problems, or porn, and that I had no epiphanies while abroad. This, of course, was not true. I experienced plenty of the above-mentioned items. I suffered sorrow. I encountered difficulties. I saw several dirty pictures. I had a few insights.

This week I renege on my promise to keep quiet about them.

Through the generosity of friends I went to Italy. One cannot go to the birthplace of the Roman Empire without running into pathos, problems, and porn, no? And the very nature of Italian culture incites some pleasurable, ass-kicking epiphanies.

So I had a few in Italy. But first the pathos, problems, and then a little porn.

Pathos: At the end of my fabulous vacation I felt sorry for myself. On the return non-stop flight from Rome to New York I sat beside a man who was pissed off at Alitalia for screwing up his seat reservations. He could not park himself next to his wife and daughter. He had to sit by me. He was damn glad to be returning to his New Jersey home where he would write a letter to Alitalia and tell them just what he thought.

Instead of reflecting upon the beauty and splendor of Italy, I was forced to brood over my bad luck in seatmates. I longed to be across the aisle, next to the diminutive Italian nun who closed her eyes and crossed herself before indulging in a bottle of red wine while playing a video game on the small screen attached to the seatback in front of her.

Problems: In the tiny, vertical village of Massa Lubrense on the Amalfi Coast, my friends and I could not find paper filters for the electric coffee maker provided for foreign visitors in the kitchen of the villa where we were staying. Italians don’t use electric coffeepots so they don’t have a need for filters. This was a minor inconvenience blown up bigger than it should have been. The less said about it the better.

Porn: There is porn in Pompeii! (See below under Epiphanies for details.) There is porn along the Amalfi Coast! Dove La Trasgressione Puo’Diventare Un Gioco is located on a side street in Sorrento next to a church and across from a pizzeria. It has the same gadgets for sale that can be found at Good Vibrations, but they run on 220 volts, not 110, and the operating instructions are written in Italian.

Epiphanies: The last time I was in Europe was in 1993. My mother and I visited Switzerland. We flew for nine hours, took trains and busses to Kandersteg, dragged our bags into our hotel room and collapsed. We awoke, hiked around town and shared a bottle of German wine.

My mother got a little tipsy from lack of sleep and the excitement of crossing the Atlantic for the first time. She raised her glass to me. Her eyes filled with tears. “Susan,” she said, “I so adore Sweden!”

My epiphany? Italy is a country that can never be confused with Sweden—or with Switzerland—or with anywhere or anything else. You can’t get tipsy in the heart of the Mediterranean and forget that you are there. The ruins won’t let you. The homemade cheeses, wines, and pastas do not allow it. The ancient olive groves and fat lemon trees whisper over and over again: “Italy, Italy, Italy.” The narrow cobblestone paths flanked by crumbling buildings, the archways, frescos, and faded doors, the peeling paint and wild drivers, the roosters that crow at dawn, and the laundry strung out to dry between noisy apartments all repeat the same thing: “You are in Italy and nowhere else.”

And yes, there was porn in Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the city in layers of soft deadly dust.

“We’ve had people say they’d like to come back as our cats,” says Juliet Lamont.

Personally, I haven’t given much thought to what I’d rather be reincarnated as; I suspect my karmic burden will restrict my options to something along the lines of a slime mold, or a Texas Republican.

But polydactyl tuxedo-cat Nimitz and his gray tabby associate Chester do seem to have good lives. They can watch the world from a deer-fencing enclosure on the garage roof and take an actual elevated catwalk to Lamont’s sister’s house next door. What they can’t do is get out and kill things.

Confining their cats is just one way Lamont and Phil Price invite wildlife to their North Berkeley home. They’ve landscaped and planted to attract birds and butterflies, and their efforts have paid off in a major way. Since they started rebuilding their creekside garden nine years ago, over 50 species of birds have shown up.

There are new faces and voices every year. Earlier this year a rowdy flock of band-tailed pigeons moved in for a while, and this spring was the first time Price and Lamont have heard the ethereal spiraling song of the Swainson’s thrush, and the less musical calls of the oak titmouse. Black phoebes hawk insects over the water and nest under the eaves of the neighboring house. Even a great blue heron has dropped in.

When they moved here in 1994, the view out the back door was a sea of Algerian ivy. “The place had two features,” Lamont recalls: “gorgeous coast live oaks and Codornices Creek.” A hired crew cleared the ivy, and Four Dimensions Landscaping installed an irrigation system and began replanting with native species that were drought-resistant and wildlife-attractant. Price and Lamont have done supplemental planting over the years. Although the ivy still encroaches from neighboring properties, maintenance and vigilant weeding in the first few years kept it from staging a comeback. “It’s really about putting something in instead of ivy,” says Price.

They also took out a eucalyptus tree, whose stump is a popular vantage point for visiting raccoons, and a Monterey cypress.

Most of the new plants came from Berkeley’s estimable Native Here Nursery, some of whose stock originates in the Codornices watershed. Native strawberry has edged out the ubiquitous Bermuda sorrel, and the birds have gone enthusiastically for the berries. Price and Lamont have also put in native bunchgrasses, Berkeley sedge, snowberry, Indian rhubarb, beeplant.

Plants were chosen for deer resistance. “They’ll take a snatch of everything, but it all comes back.” Lamont says. As we talk, two young bucks wander down through the yard toward the creek, one taking a random bite. Price exhorts them to eat the ivy instead; it still borders the native garden on an adjacent property. The deer are very much at home, bringing their new fawns every spring. Their habitual paths have been left in place.

“When deer have established a pathway, it’s hard to shift them off it,” he explains.

The only exception to the natives theme is the front garden, planted as a magnet for hummingbirds and butterflies. Natives like flowering currant, penstemon, and sticky monkeyflower mingle with Mexican bush sage and scabiosa. There’s also native wild rose for the butterflies and bees.

The creek is a work in progress. Price and Lamont haven’t modified the streambed, but they’ve planted willows and red-twig dogwood to buffer extreme flows.

“Urban Creeks Council taught us five different erosion-control techniques,” says Price. “The easiest is willow stakes.”

They’re tracking stream temperatures through the summer and monitoring water quality. Aquatic creatures have responded already: after the eucalyptus and cypress were removed, the damselfly population exploded—and the phoebes were very happy.

“We have newts or salamanders,” Lamont says. “We wish we had frogs; they’re further downstream.”

Just upstream, Codornices Creek is straitjacketed in a concrete box culvert. Last year two mule deer fawns fell into the steep-sided trench; Lamont and Price heard them squealing in the night and hauled them out. Lamont explains their plans for that section of the creek: “We want to restore the neighboring property, take out the gabions and concrete, put in step pools for fish passage, give the creek room for moving around.”

They’re hoping for a grant that will let them get rid of the box channel.

And how do the neighbors feel about all this? “We have them in every year for a barbecue and people love the place”, she continues. “They’re all really excited about doing restoration work themselves. When people have an understanding of what’s going on, they develop a vested interest in it.”

Chester does get out into the garden as well, on a leash. And so have a lot of human visitors: groups from Berkeley Path Wanderers and the Greenbelt Alliance, and hundreds on recent native-plant and Bay-friendly garden tours. If it’s featured on future tours, this thriving experiment in welcoming the natural world is well worth a stop.

A young buck makes his way through the garden toward Codornices Creek. Photograph by Ron Sullivan.

There is a whiff of “regime change” in the air these days, but not where you might expect it. Not in Iraq, where the conservative United States-backed Shiites are already in power. Not in Iran, where White House threats have served to unite, rather than divide, that country. But in Pakistan, and for reasons that go back to a 1992 document that maps out a strategy for a new Cold War.

Consider the following developments:

The Bush administration’s Man in Kabul, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, recently fingered Pakistan as the source of the current fighting in the southern part of his country. “The world should go where terrorism is nourished, where it is provided money and ideology,” he told a Kabul press conference this past June, “The war in Afghanistan should not be limited to Afghanistan.”

When President Bush visited Pakistan in March, he lectured President Pervez Musharraf about the need to be more aggressive in the “war on terrorism”—Pakistan has lost more soldiers fighting the Taliban in its northwestern tribal areas than the entire NATO coalition has lost in Afghanistan—and refused to discuss the issue of Kashmir, the major flashpoint in Pakistan-India relations, one that has brought the two nuclear armed powers to the brink of war on several occasions.

Indeed, when Musharraf asked for the same nuclear agreement that Washington had just handed New Delhi, Bush openly insulted his Islamabad hosts. With the Pakistani President standing stiffly beside him, the U.S. president told the press, “I explained that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and hi`stories.”

The nuclear deal—which was favorably voted out of House and Senate committees—would let India bypass Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty sanctions slapped on it for secretly developing atomic weapons, thus allowing it to buy uranium for its civilian reactors. That in turn would let the Indians divert their meager domestic uranium supplies into constructing more nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration also cut $350 million in civilian and military aid to Pakistan because of a “failure” to improve democracy and human rights.

And according to Syad Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief for the Asia Times, “Western intelligence” has helped funnel money through Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and London to insurgents in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.

So if the Pakistanis are starting to feel like they are in someone’s crosshairs, one can hardly blame them. The question is why? Musharraf has basically done everything the White House wanted him to do, including breaking with the Taliban and sending 90,000 troops to seal the border with Afghanistan.

The answer is not that Pakistan has fallen out of favor, but that it is a pawn that has outlived its usefulness in a global chess match aimed at China.

Back in 1992 the Clinton administration drew up a Defense Planning Guidance document that laid out a blueprint for a post-Cold War world: “The United States will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States,” the document read, continuing, “Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States.”

Jump ahead to the year 2000 and a Foreign Affairs article by soon-to-be National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice: “China is not a ‘status quo’ power, but one that would like to alter Asia’s balance of power in its own favor…The United States must deepen its cooperation with Japan and South Korea and maintain its commitment to a robust military presence in the region,” she wrote, adding that the United States had to “pay close attention to India’s role in the regional balance” if the latter was to be recruited into an anti-China alliance.

While Sept. 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq derailed this grand scheme, recent developments suggest it is back on track.

The anti-China alliance is already well underway.

Japan and Australia have agreed to field U.S.-supplied anti-ballistic missiles, and the Administration is wooing India to do the same. While the rationale for the ABMs is North Korea, the real target in China’s 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Japan—which has one of the largest navies in the world—is stepping up its military coordination with the United States, and has agreed to support the United States in case it intervenes in a war between China and Taiwan.

In the meantime, the United States is pouring men and materials into Asia and beefing up bases in Japan and Guam. It is also conducting war games with India, and jointly patrolling the Malacca Straits with the Indian Navy.

Add to this the U.S. bases in Central Asia—Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—plus recent attacks by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on China’s military (using some of the same language as in the 1992 document) and one can only conclude that the Defense Guidance Plan is alive and well.

But while chess is a supremely logical game, diplomacy is considerably messier, and the grand scheme to corner the dragon is stirring up some dangerous regional furies.

For instance, to get Japan on board, the United States has encouraged a more muscular foreign policy by Tokyo, including sending troops to Iraq and dumping Article Nine of the Japanese constitution renouncing war as a “sovereign right of the nation.”

But this resurgent Japanese nationalism has angered and frightened nations in the region, many of which have vivid memories of World War II. South Korea, which suffered through more than three decades of brutal Japanese occupation, is barely on speaking terms with Tokyo, and has come close to blows with Japan over the Tokodo Islands claimed by both nations.

This is hardly the atmosphere for a grand alliance.

The law of unintended consequences may be playing itself out with Indian and Pakistan as well.

India’s central strategy has always been to insure control of Kashmir and to weaken the Pakistani Army, two goals that the Bush Administration seems to share.

According to the Asia Times, a CIA official told the Indians that weakening the Pakistani Army was central to the United States’ goal of bringing “democracy” to Pakistan, though the lack of it never bothered Washington in the past. The Times also reports that the CIA has been meeting with exiled former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who recently formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy.

General Hamid Gul, former head of the Pakistani InterService Intelligence organization, told the PakTribune that he thought the U.S. was aiming to replace Musharraf.

If the United States sides with India on Kashmir, Pakistan could be looking at a strategic defeat in the long-running dispute that would not only weaken the army, but might destabilize the country.

Are the nuclear deal and the Kashmir policy a quid pro quo for India joining the anti-China alliance? It is hard to fathom what else might explain Washington’s relentless criticism of Pakistan for not doing enough in the “war on terrorism,” or the recent cut in aid.

Washington’s obsession with China is unleashing some particularly malevolent forms of nationalism that threaten to destabilize a broad swath of the region from South Asia to the north Pacific. In this chess match, India, with its enormous population and economic potential, is a major piece on the board. Pakistan, with a sixth the population and a tenth the economic potential, is a pawn.

It’s important to remember these days that during the events that led to the 2003 takeover of the Oakland Unified School District by the State of California, there was never an allegation the district’s budget shortfall occurred because someone in the administration of Superintendent Dennis Chaconas or on the OUSD Board of Trustees was either stealing or misappropriating district money.

Don’t take my word for it. SB39, the state law that mandated the takeover, reads at Section I(e): “While in need of a loan from the State of California, there have not been any accusations of intentional mismanagement or fraud in the Oakland Unified School District.”

So what caused the shortfall? Former Superintendent Dennis Chaconas proposed, and the school board approved, a teacher pay raise that the district could not afford. From everything we’ve heard, the district’s antiquated computer financial software did anticipate the full financial effect of the pay raise and, therefore, did not detect the looming budget shortfall until it was too late to patch it over.

The state Legislature looking into the Oakland “problem” in 2003 also found that fiscal problems aside, Oakland schools were moving on the right track under the Chaconas administration. SB39’s Section I(f) reads that “[t]he Oakland Unified School District has made demonstrable academic improvements over the last few years, witnessed by test score improvements, more fully credentialed teachers in Oakland classrooms, and increased parental and community involvement.”

How Oakland was supposed to attract “more fully credentialed teachers” to our school district without that massive raise in teacher salaries is a fiscal management trick not explained by the state legislature either in its deliberations back in 2003 nor by anyone else in state government, to this day.

In any event, as a result of the 2003 OUSD budget crisis, it is widely believed that the State of California took three actions under SB39 to help the district get its fiscal house back in order. The first step was to provide enough money—a $100 million line-of-credit loan—for the district to balance its budget and weather the 2003 crisis. All of that loan has now been appropriated to Oakland.

The second state action was to authorize a state-appointed administrator—Randolph Ward, in this case—to take over the district and reorganize it so that the district maintained its “demonstrable academic improvements” and “continue[d] the key educational reforms that have benefited Oakland public school pupils in the last three years” during the Chaconas administration (as pointed out in Section I(g) of SB39) while putting in place sound fiscal policies and systems.

Despite the fact that some local commentators have already declared the soon-to-be-over Randolph Ward administration a smashing success in that area (see San Francisco Chronicle writer Chip Johnson’s July 4 column “Oakland Owes Debt To Randy Ward”), it is too soon to tell—and we’re still too much in the dark to know—whether Mr. Ward is leaving Oakland in good fiscal shape.

But there was a third, implied state mandate in SB39, the widely-believed understanding that while the state was putting the Oakland schools back on the right track, the state would simultaneously train Oakland school officials in sound fiscal management policies so that once the schools were returned to our control, we wouldn’t make the same mistake again. SB39, after all, was never intended as either a permanent state takeover or as a revolving door in which the state would have to permanently withdraw and intervene again, as Oakland continued to fumble our own educational ball.

So who was supposed to provide the “sound fiscal management” training? Here we begin to stretch out into the area of quantum physics, where the normal rules of logic start to break down, and we find a case of the dogs teaching the dogs not to bark.

In the months that led up to the fiscal decisions that ended in OUSD’s 2003 fiscal crisis, the district’s finances were being closely monitored by four separate agencies or organizations: the OUSD Board of Trustees, the office of the Alameda County Superintendent (Sheila Jordan), the semi-public Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), and the office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (Jack O’Connell). All of them looked at the massive teacher pay hike proposed by Mr. Chaconas’ administration, and none of them said that the pay hike would bust Oakland’s budget.

Three of these four entities—the county superintendent, FCMAT, and the state superintendent—had their own, independent staff auditing teams to monitor and evaluate the budget figures supplied by the OUSD staff. Only one of them—the OUSD board—had no independent staff of their own. OUSD trustees had to rely completely on the staff presentations and assertions made by the OUSD fiscal office.

So guess which one of the four got blamed for failure of oversight in 2003, and whose authority got taken away by the state legislature under SB39. The OUSD Board of Trustees, of course. The local guys.

Under SB39, the same state superintendent who missed the fiscal problems that came close to bankrupting the district was rewarded, for his vigilance or lack thereof, with direct control over Oakland Unified. FCMAT was given broad and largely-undefined powers to decide when the district was “ready” to be returned to local control. And Alameda County Superintendent Sheila Jordan…? Well, SB39 devotes a whole section making sure she didn’t lose any of her powers, with Section 12 mandating that “The Alameda County Superintendent of Schools maintains the responsibility to superintend school districts under its jurisdiction. This act does not remove any statutory or regulatory rights, duties, or obligations from the county superintendent of school.”

There is some irony, therefore, in the slightly paternalistic implication in SB39 that three of the four entities that dropped the ball on Oakland’s 2003 school budget crisis—the state and county superintendents and FCMAT—should instruct the fourth—the OUSD Board of Trustees—on how to do things properly. Still, it’s a fair question to ask, just for the sake of the discussion, how well have the elected trustees been kept informed along the way so that they are properly prepared to take over once state control has ended?

Not very well, apparently.

We already know that after local trustees authorized a request for qualifications (RFQ) in February of 2005 for the possible sale of the OUSD downtown properties, Mr. Ward and Mr. O’Connell kept local trustees in the dark for a year while they selected a firm for final negotiations. That’s significant in part because at least one of the trustees who was initially in support of the property sale—Gary Yee—says he did so only in the belief that the money for the sale could be used to immediately pay off the state loan and possibly lead to a quick return to local control. Mr. Yee only learned when the letter of intent was released last month that under the initial terms negotiated with TerraMark/Urban America, the bulk of the money for the downtown OUSD properties is not scheduled to be paid by the developer to the district for five years. Not so immediate as Mr. Yee had envisioned when he voted for the RFQ back in 2005.

Another revelation of how much OUSD trustees have been kept in the loop—or not been kept in the loop—came during the emergency board meeting called by Trustee President David Kakishiba following the sudden announcement that Mr. Ward was leaving for San Diego. Several trustees complained that State Superintendent O’Connell had not been communicating with the board in general—and Mr. Kakishiba in particular—about much of anything over the three years of the state takeover. “O’Connell has never responded to David [Kakishiba] even out of courtesy,” the longest-sitting trustee, Noel Gallo, said, a little bitterly. “We’re still not informed.” To which Alice Spearman, the trustee with the least tenure, replied that she did not understand the problem, since she talked with Mr. O’Connell on a regular basis, and he always returned her calls.

Taking all of the trustees at their word on this, and conceding the fact that Mr. O’Connell has a perfect right to speak with Ms. Spearman any time he wants, and she to him, what does it tell us about the superintendent’s intent about local preparation for local control when Mr. O’Connell “regularly” speaks with the trustees’ juniorist member, and no-one else? That the purpose of this whole exercise was never to help Oakland succeed at local control?

If so, then what was the purpose? That, my friends, continues to be the real mystery of the Oakland school takeover.

Snowy egrets and coal-black cormorants roosting in trees—in Oakland? Hansel and Gretel along with the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, brought to life with a Magic Key—in Oakland? A Daimyo oak bonsai, in cultivation since Abraham Lincoln’s term as President—in Oakland? Venetian gondolas gliding across sparkling waters under fairy lights—in Oakland? Discover these wonders and more, in Oakland’s Lakeside Park at Lake Merritt.

A combination of fresh and salt-water covering 155 acres, Lake Merritt is the largest man-made lake in the United States and a delightful focal point smack in the middle of urban Oakland. Thanks go to Dr. Samuel Merritt who donated dammed tidal water from the headwaters of Indian Slough for its creation. As part of well-maintained Lakeside Park, it’s a welcome oasis of green surrounded by expansive lawns and shade-giving trees, and offering a host of possibilities to add fun to any day of the week.

After a long absence, I rediscovered Lake Merritt on a crisp, brilliantly sunny Saturday morning. The park and most of its inhabitants were in a mellow mood. It wasn’t too early for enthusiasts cruising the level, paved 3.4-mile path around the lake. A mixed bag of joggers, walkers and cyclists passed across my field of vision. All ages, solo, in pairs and small groups, chatting, attached to cell phone or iPod, attired in the latest techno fitness garb, comfortable sweats or everyday wear, they circled the perimeter, not even pausing to partake of appealing lake-view benches.

Being on a fact-finding mission, I set out to investigate the activities at hand and was drawn to the least mellow area of the park, the Wildlife Refuge. A cacophony of bird conversations filled the air—shrieks, cries, honks and coos—a just representation of the wealth of bird life inhabiting two islands and the lakeside refuge. A population surge of Canada geese, not satisfied with only one settlement area, roamed everywhere in the park. More selective avians restricted themselves to occupying island tree-side perches. Fan-like white plumage marked nestled egrets while cormorants masquerading as black-clad sentinels staked out the highest branches.

A National Historic Landmark and the nation’s oldest wildlife refuge, the mixture of tributary fresh water and tidal salt water provides seasonal and permanent homes to birds, fish and invertebrates. Much of this wildlife is well represented inside the Rotary Science Center, which aims to bring people and nature together learning about estuary ecology. The faces of three school-age boys didn’t move far from the glass fronting a buzzing beehive on the day of my visit. I was more interested in the wall-length display of bird life and a case full of skulls within this rustic, but informative center.

Outside young children focused their interest on the pint-size playground, all bright colors, wood and molded plastic, atop a sand base perfect for digging and building. What birds? Turquoise slide, purple bars, yellow rings and a lavender fire pole like delicious candies were waiting to be sampled.

My next stop was the Boating Center, where aquatic choices for multiple visits lay in wait. Whether you fancy sailing an El Toro, windsurfing, kayaking, paddling a canoe, rowing a boat or exercising your feet with a paddleboat, this would be the right place. And the next time you need to impress that special someone, what could be more romantic than a moonlight gondola ride? Who needs Italy?

In the Demonstration Gardens I was greeted with a placard announcing composting classes and another signifying this as a Bay Friendly Garden. Much like a work-in-progress, there is plenty here to please the eye and tingle those green thumbs. Well defined paths wander among mature growth and newly planted beds. Among the eclectic combinations thrive fuchsias, cacti, lilies, herbs and palms. In the raised vegetable beds of artichoke, Swiss chard and arugula, I was cheered by the profusion of sweet peas in reds, pinks and violets, as well as bright yellow marigolds.

A peaceful haven surrounds the koi pond where the soothing sounds of cascading water, orange bird-of-paradise, blue agapanthus, and an orange torii gate dedicated to the memory of Frank Ogawa abide. A mallard couple lay almost hidden on the banks.

Within the grounds of the Lakeside Garden Center, behind a traditional wood fence capped in steel-gray is located another tranquil refuge, the Bonsai Garden. Over 100 bonsai and suiseki of amazing quality and beauty are lovingly displayed on raised wood platforms in the setting of a simple Japanese garden. Coast live oak, Monterey cypress, Chinese quince, shrunken in an Alice In Wonderland world yet perfect in form and detail, rest among a dry riverbed and stone ornaments. Equally admirable to the oak bonsai given to Lincoln’s ambassador to China was a trident maple, identical to a park-side shade tree, yet only three feet tall.

Saturday morning was too early to see action at the Lawn Bowling Greens but the rectangles of neatly trimmed lawn bordered by benches appeared poised for future matches. At the Edoff Memorial Bandstand music was a faint memory, perhaps still heard by the gentleman practicing tai chi. Even without a concert, this 1923 multi-columned platform topped with red-tiled roof and trimmed in coppery patina is a handsome sight.

Ahead a stream of strollers and wide-eyed toddlers all seemed to be heading in one direction, the music of the calliope a Pied Piper drawing them forth. I caught up with them at the Shoe—the one with so many children and the entrance to Children’s Fairyland, around since 1950. What child could resist a magic kingdom where beloved stories and imagination come to life, where gentle farm animals await their attention, where adults are not admitted unless accompanied by children?

Saturday morning was not too early for action here. The line was long; birthday party guests were arriving in pastel dresses and white Mary Janes and the child-sized Ferris wheel’s enclosed cages were slowly rotating. Though paint colors may have faded, the magic remains.

In 1925, 126 lampposts with 3,400 bulbs lit up the circumference of Lake Merritt for the first time. Any visit is incomplete without following this Necklace of Lights. Glancing from the water’s blue expanse toward buildings fronting the lake, one notes the presence of Oakland’s past through its architecture. Bas reliefs and carved moldings on stately stucco and brick, brimming flower boxes reflecting the park’s natural setting, a curved edifice with aqua tinted glass carrying the water skyward, high rise businesses with faceless windows and smooth lines.

From park settings to open expanses, the circle of lights leads you. Sample the benches, sit and take in aqua depths, great cityscapes, joyous fountains, feasting Canada geese and fellow outdoor enthusiasts. Egrets, cormorants, gondolas, bonsai, Cinderella, fairy lights. In Oakland? Yes, making Lake Merritt much more than the sum of its parts.

For those of you who are regular readers of this column, it will come as no surprise that today’s topic is one related to energy efficiency. Keeping our globe cool means generating less heat in all of our pursuits—or at least burning less oil or gas.

It’s very exciting being alive today. So many things are changing and there is such promise in new technologies and ways of thinking. I can certainly understand and have great compassion for the argument that all of our answers do not lie in science.

Sometimes, science and technology take us in the wrong direction. But given our obsession with having fast travel, ready resources and instant everything, it, at very least, behooves us to buy these marvels with pennies and to make them with plentiful resources.

It is in this spirit that I present the notion of lighting our houses with our little friend the Light Emitting Diode—the LED. LED’s have been around for decades, lighting up the panels on Lieutenant Uhura’s Command Panel and flashing at you from your alarm clock and VCR.

They’ve been doing these things because they are cheap, cool and very long lasting for low wattage applications. But they haven’t been considered for big lighting jobs until the very recent past when LED’s have become capable of providing higher luminosities.

There’s a revolution raging in backwaters that we don’t often hear about and it involves a great race to produce a LED that can complete with the incandescent or fluorescent light bulb. Though the race may not be won, the lager has some major advantages to offer and it may be time to put your feet in the water right now.

I bought two devices this summer. One was a book-light. I saw this at a client’s house and decided I just had to have one. It has a single LED in a spring loaded arm and provides enough light to read by without waking the wife. It will also be fine for reading to the kiddies at camp, if I’m not too embarrassing or stupid to be seen or heard from this year.

The second device is a flashlight. It has 24 LED’s and is good enough to do my job examining things under houses or in attics as long as I don’t have to look way across to the other side.

A year ago, I would not have considered such a purchase but these things are getting cheaper and more effective at a measurable pace.

Now we’re starting to see LED lighting designed specifically for houses and commercial buildings and not surprisingly, it’s starting with bulbs that can replace typical incandescent or halogen ones.

The cost of these is currently very high but before you say no to them, consider what we pay for the electricity to run our 25 cent incandescent bulbs.

Here’s a general breakdown of the efficiency of LED’s compared to our current methods:

A conventional light bulb (incandescent) is about 16 lumens per watt (lm/W) and a tungsten bulb is about 22 lm/W. A fluorescent lamp may range from 50-100 (average of 60) lm/W so it’s not hard to see why we like the fluorescent so well.

LED’s have gotten about 22 lm/W in the past but in 2003 bulbs were tested at 65 lm/W and this last year we saw a test of an LED that was at 131 lm/W. This means that you will soon be able to get as much light out of an LED for about 1/7th the cost.

This technology is clearly growing quickly and if I were much on investing, I’d be looking to major developers of LED home lighting as an investment. You see, in today’s homes, lighting is a major power user. The reason is that incandescent lamps are little heaters.

When you leave a 100 watt bulb going, it just like leaving a tiny oven going (those Easy Bake ovens of the past were heated with a light bulb, but I wouldn’t know anything about those since I never played with them or baked any cupcakes in them no matter what my sister or any of her friends say).

A LED has a number of advantages over both conventional bulbs as well as fluorescents. The first is, of course, the low cost of operation.

They’ve already overtaken fluorescents on that but they are also simpler than the fluorescents to install because they don’t require a ballast. Fluorescents have to control the flow of current.

LEDs can be shaken, stirred or used to beat your electrician over the head and they won’t stop working. Very tough little light source, the LED, so you won’t be replacing them because you banged into it while looking for your ski goggles in the closet.

LEDs last a very, very long time and their cost should be seriously adjusted for their longevity. An LED will typically last 10 years and you’re probably going to find that light fixture ugly before then and want to change it so once again, the little LED races to the finish line.

Now, there are a few problems. They’re not cheap. The equivalent of a common bulb is currently about 20 bucks so that’s 20-80 times the cost of bulbs down at ACE but I guarantee that these will be dropping rapidly.

If you consider that it costs about 25 cents a day to run a 100 watt light bulb and that it will cost about 4 cents a day to run a similar LED lamp, it’s not too hard to figure out that you’re going to save the cost of the bulb in a fairly short time and go on to saving loads over the twenty years that it’s running.

My final argument (for now) in favor of my little friend the LED is that it’s cool. Remember the Easy Bake oven story. These will not qualify.

You can generate hundred of lumens and not have your lamp get warm enough to burn anything. This means much greater home safety since hot bulbs and the hot wires that are feeding these hungry beasts won’t be inside your house.

I know that I tend to beat the global warming drum quite a bit but here’s one more way that we can produce less CO2 without giving up the amount of light you’re used to.

LED’s, by virtue of their generating light through the excitation of various substrates, can come in a range of colors (and, of course, white) and so there are lots of architectural and artistic possibilities waiting to burst forth so keep your eyes peeled for rings, ribbons and fabrics of LED lighting to illuminate and color your world.

Last week I left my readers with a newly installed plant, in its hole of the right size and (shallow) depth, with soil amendments, if any, added on top to be worked in gradually by our ancient allies, the earthworms and other burrowers in the soil.

Suppose this fresh new plant is a tree. Suppose you’re beginning to get over how puny it looks—and it does, because you’ve been smart enough to buy a small youngster which will suffer less from transplant shock and require less digging on your part, and because it just lost a quarter or so of its height when you took it out of the pot in which it stood tiptoe on its roots. And the trunk is a pitiful whip compared to the might thing you have in mind.

You might want to stake that tree. It’s often a good idea, and like most good ideas it works better if you know why you’re doing it.

What you want to do is support that reedy little trunk until—only until—it can reliably support itself and the canopy of leaves above it.

Don’t stake a tree to keep the neighbors’ overly enthusiastic skateboarder kids or your beloved klutzy dog from breaking the new tree in half. That requires a different sort of thing—a fence or guardrail around the tree, not touching it, and well below the first branches.

The best time to stake is when planting, so you don’t traumatize any exploratory roots. I like big fat wooden stakes which will rot underground eventually. Those single stakes with a jughandle gizmo I see on the streets might work in a pinch, but they’re a compromise.

You want two stakes, and something padded and a little flexible to tie the tree. The things that look like bits of used tire and wire are fine.

Drive the stakes in as deep as you can, with at least a fist’s width between each and the tree in the middle.

Here’s the subtlety: arrange the trio so they face as a chorus line into the prevailing wind. Here, that’s usually from the west, so the stakes would go north and south of the tree.

Trees build up trunk tissue faster when the trunk gets some “exercise” by flexing in the wind. Some Cal professor reportedly got a bunch of grad students to untie half a set of firmly pinioned trees daily and sway them by hand for half an hour, then retie them.

Those trees got fat faster than their peers who were kept immobile. Amazing what can be done with academic indenture.

The stakes should be below the lowest branches, so those don’t get beaten up on them when it’s windy.

Leave branches on as low as possible for a couple of years; that beefs up the trunk too. Remove them before you’d need a saw for that.

Work the ties in a figure-8, around the trunk, crossed, and then affixed to the stakes.

Central Works “The Inspector General” a new comedy, Thurs., Fri., and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 30. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381.

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Footloose” the musical based on the 1984 film at 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat., and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theater, 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through August 5. Tickets are $12-$20. 524-9132. www.ccct.org

Crowded Fire Theater Company “We Are Not These Hands” a comedy about the friendship between two teenaged girls in a fictional third-world nation, Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. through July 16 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $10- $20. www.crowdedfire.org

Willy Claflin and Friends with storytelling, music and puppets at 7 p.m. at the Rockridge Public Library, 5366 College Ave. 597-5017.

Juggler Marcus Raymond with magic and fun at 7 p.m. at the Temescal Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 5202 Telegraph Ave. 597-5049.

READINGS AND LECTURES

Geoffrey Nunberg explains “Talking Right: How the Right Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left Wing Freak Show” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500.

Story Tells, a storytelling swap, with Ed Silberman at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, Jack London Square, Oakland. 238-8585.

Poetry Express with Linda Zeiser, editor of the East Bay lesbian anthology “What We Want From You” at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com

MUSIC AND DANCE

Tommy Emmanuel at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater. Cost is $22.50-$23-50. 548-1761.

Art at the Kala Institute is becoming increasingly multi-media. The current show, called “Future Tense,” predicts a future in which reality is replaced by its virtual substitute.

Taro Hattori’s Beaut Brute consists of disassembled parts of M16 rifles, made of plastic mirrors with great precision and laid out neatly on faux fur. A luscious bunch of reflecting grapes hangs in the corner of this glossy installation that explores a world in which violence and abundance are aestheticized.

Kathryn Kenworth’s Footnotes are stacks of fake books. They were carefully made of cardboard to look like books, but they cannot be read or opened because they are fake, virtual books. They have gone one step beyond the computer, which provides information, mere data rather than knowledge. They suggest a world in which appearance has replaced reality. But then, even in the past, there were so-called “libraries” in stately homes with all the leather-bound, never-opened classics adorning the book shelves.

Daniel Ross, artist in residence at Kala’s Electronic Media Center, presents digital photographs of nature, made with ink jet, acrylic glitter and epoxy on plywood. One of his pieces shows a photograph of three white owls floating above a tree trunk, another a pig with two heads and six legs standing in a kitsch landscape with rainbow and all. Ross, I think, comments on the platitude of so many landscape paintings in the past.

Best in Show is the combination of photography and sculpture in Nature Scenes by Srdjan Loncar, whose residence at Kala was provided by the Alliance of Artists’ Communities and the Irvine Foundation for artists affected by Hurricane Katrina. The viewer looks at a campfire environment with a tree stump and rock formations before realizing that what looks solid is soft as it has all been made of styrofoam, covered by detailed digital photographs to make it appear “real.” A CD player hidden in the campfire even makes crackling sounds of wood burning. It is all very disorienting as nature is replaced by technological simulacrum.

All four artists in “Future Tense” have used technology to make counterfeits, raising important moral questions for our time. They will hold a gallery talk at 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 15, the final day of the exhibition.

FUTURE TENSE

Through July 15 at the Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave.

549-2977. www.kala.org.

Contributed photo

A few of the works in “Future Tense” on display at the Kala Art Institute.

The play begins with the gorgeously dressed rake Loveless (Elijah Alexander) addressing the audience and explaining why and how we and he are there—in this small open air theater on a lovely California summer evening, the stage decked out in oversized 17th-century graphics, floral and starkly black and white at the same time.

Loveless’ speech is casual, witty, and conspiratorial. He calls himself by his real name, Elijah, not his character’s name. He reassures us that the whole play will not be in verse like the speech he is currently delivering, and concludes by telling us that the ultimate reason for everyone taking part in the play about to begin is ... clothes.

And he’s right, who wouldn’t want to wear those cascades of silks, fields of satin, drapes of velvet and towers of bright cottons. Even in summer.

Fashion and all the lightness, frivolity and indulgence that the word implies lie at the heart of Restoration Comedy, the new play by Amy Freed that opened at CalShakes on Saturday evening.

The play is an amalgam of two late Restoration comedies written in England in 1696, some 35 years after the death of Cromwell, the restoration of the monarchy and the reopening of the theaters that had been closed during the Puritan control of the government.

The audiences of Restoration England preferred a wilder, faster-paced theatrical event with multiple plots. The subjects tended to be sexually explicit and unsentimental; the rake—the riotous, glamorously dissipated and sexually irresistible courtier—is a Restoration character.

Actresses, rather than boys, had begun to play women’s roles, which added an erotic element for the audiences that had not existed before. Nell Gwynn, who became the most famous comedic actress of the time, also became the king’s mistress.

By 1688, however, the “Merry Monarch” Charles II had been replaced by the Protestant Mary and William and middle-class respectability had begun to concern the English, socially and legally.

In 1696 an actor named Colley Cibber wrote a play entitled Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion. The play—and it is this play that the first act of Freed’s two-act play is largely based on—is about a virtuous wife who manages to reform her rakish husband by seducing him into sexual, and thereby moral, submission.

Loveless has spent ten years away from London, practicing his debauchery and returns only when he believes his wife Amanda (Caralyn Kozlowski) is dead.

Having run into Loveless, a former companion and fellow rake Ned Worthy (Kaleo Griffith) tells the very much alive Amanda that her husband is also very much alive. And the two of them, Worthy and Amanda, plot how she can win back Loveless’ love.

Winding through this main story are a passel of secondary characters, chief among them Sir Novelty Fashion (Danny Scheie), a burlesque bonbon of 17th-century foppery in day-glo codpiece, trailing lace sleeves and an avalanche of blonde curls. Sir Novelty Fashion is on the trail of seduction as well, but his is the seduction of high society, born of his narcissistic need to form the eyes of the fashionable into his own gem-lashed mirrors.

Amanda is successful in her conquest of Loveless; and when she reveals her identity to him, he is overwhelmed. Her ability to be both virginal and virtuous wife as well as lustful woman of pleasure fulfills his ultimate desire for “variety.”

She convinces him that he has only one form of love left to try—fidelity. They retire to the country and all is well.

Until the second act.

The second act is based on John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, a play that was written in response to Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift. It takes place after the retirement to the country, and was meant to answer the sentimental goodness—what Vanbrugh must have considered hypocritical and pandering to emerging social mores—of Cibber’s extremely successful play.

Vanbrugh takes on marriage, suggesting at play’s end that it serves only as a convenience, not so much to keep people chaste as to allow them to love, either in marriage or out. For ”the joys of life and love /Are in variety.”

In Freed’s second act not only does Loveless fall into his old devilish habits by pursuing and conquering the worldly wise and beautiful Berinthia (Marcia Pizzo) but Amanda herself finds her virtue assailed and her monogamous commitment to her philandering husband under attack.

Ned Worthy admits that he loves her. Just possibly she loves him as well.

In counterpoint to the marital problems of the Lovelesses, Sir Novelty Fashion and his brother Young Fashion take a large part of the play’s action to examine marriage from the standpoint of financial and social alliance.

Blending these two 17th century plays has clearly caused some problems for the writer, not the least of which was deciding what is relevant for a contemporary audience. It is not just language that is at stake here.

Does one write a 21st-century play that is placed in a 17th-century setting, rather like one might place it in the Ukraine or Bali, an exotically different cultural milieu that is nonetheless impinged upon by the global culture?

Or does one simply take the play and translate it into contemporary language, leaving in the social arguments whether or not they are relevant or politically correct to the modern mind?

Freed has opted for the former. Many of the intricacies of the original play, especially The Relapse, were dropped. All the considerable verbal philosophizing that goes on between characters about marriage and about love is gone. The ever-present gender-specific determinations about what man would do versus what woman can do are gone.

Even though much of the moral fascination of the original plays has been replaced with a sunny but dubious variety-is-the-essence-and-spice-of-life philosophy, Restoration Comedy is a lot of fun. It’s excellently acted and produced, and makes for a frothy and enjoyable summer evening’s entertainment.

CalShakes’ Restoration Comedy plays at 8 p.m. through July 30 at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda. $15-$57. 548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org. Nightly Grove Talks (7:15 p.m.) by members of the artistic staff provide insight into the production.

No one quite knew what to make of the new invention at first. The ability to capture motion on film, while a scientific breakthrough, didn’t seem to portend much for the future. Most deemed it a novelty, a toy which would quickly lose its appeal.

Few could have imagined in 1894 that these flickering images, first seen through an eyepiece at five cents a pop and later projected on a sheet tacked to a wall, would not only become a new art form, but the art form of the new century.

The next few decades saw the nascent medium grow at a rapid rate, in length, in maturity and in significance, expanding from 20-second clips to three-hour epics; from brief celluloid documents of real world events—called “actualities”—to feature-length documentaries; from amateurish filmed stage productions to feature-length narrative movies, rich in character and emotion; from sophomoric roughhouse comedy to the full-fledged visual humor of the great comedians, sophisticated in their use of the new cinematic language.

By 1927, the language of film as a visual medium was nearly complete and was just reaching its peak. The moving camera had been perfected; the potential of montage had been deeply explored; the power and emotion of the close-up had been exploited; acting techniques had evolved to suit the medium. A vast array of genres had been firmly established: the western, horror, drama, comedy, slapstick and farce, melodrama and satire, adaptations and original works, special effects, documentaries, instructional films, political films, avante garde experiments and mainstream entertainments. The breadth and depth of what was arguably the most universal of art forms was staggering.

But just as technology had made it all possible, so technology would tear it all down. With the advent of reliable sound technology and the dawn of the talking picture in 1927, 30 years worth of the medium’s range and diversity was almost instantly demoted to the status of a genre. No longer were they called “moving pictures”—now they were “silent.” From the lowest and crudest pieces of hackwork to the towering artistic masterpieces of the era, all were now thrown together in a single category, the name of which took on a pejorative quality. Films that had entertained, inspired and enriched viewers for three decades were now considered outdated, quaint, laughable, behind the times.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is an attempt to remedy that situation, to clear away the myths and misconceptions with quality prints presented at proper projection speeds and accompanied by live music. In other words, silent films as they were meant to be seen. Now in its 11th year, the festival runs Friday, July 14 through Sunday, July 16 at the Castro Theater.

Some of the those misconceptions stem from the moniker itself, for silent films were never silent; they were always shown with live musical accompaniment. The largest theaters featured full orchestras, mid-sized theaters featured Wurlitzer organs, and the smallest theaters employed a piano player. The musicians either improvised on the spot or performed a written score, often of their own composition or sometimes provided by the film’s producers.

Another misconception is that silent films were of poor visual quality, with high-contrast images of muddled blacks and grays, and always featured ham-fisted, overly dramatic acting and silly figures running about at abnormal speeds. The speed problem is simple: Silent films were shot at roughly 16 frames per second, as opposed to sound films, which are shot at 24 frames per second. Since the advent of sound, silent films have too often been mistakenly projected at sound speed, leading viewers to believe that they were manic and absurd. And most of the prints available over the years have been low-quality 16-millimeter transfers from the original 35-millimeter format, causing a loss of visual detail that was compounded by the deterioration of old nitrate prints.

If you’ve never seen a big-screen presentation of silent film, there is no better place to start than the Silent Film Festival. While there are several venues in the Bay Area which provide excellent presentations of silent films throughout the year, with excellent prints and live music, the festival goes a step further, providing historical context with informative on-stage interviews and panel discussions, trailers and outtakes and historical short subjects. Many of this year’s programs feature archival footage of the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, and even a “neo-silent” newsreel of this year’s centennial commemoration of the quake at Lotta’s Fountain, shot with an authentic hand-cranked silent-era camera.

This year’s festival could be rightly called the Year of the Woman, for most of its marquee evening presentations are starring vehicles for some of the silent era’s finest actresses. The festival kicks off with Seventh Heaven, starring Janet Gaynor in a performance which earned her the Best Actress Oscar at the first Academy Awards. Gaynor plays a street waife who falls in love with a sewer worker, played by Charles Farrell, only to see World War I intervene. The film was directed by Frank Borzage. (Borzage and Gaynor will each be the subject of retrospectives at Pacific Film Archive starting July 21.)

Saturday’s lineup features Mary Pickford in Sparrows. Pickford was the most successful and powerful woman in Hollywood in her time, one of the few stars with enough clout to eventually assume creative control of her films, selecting her material as well as her directors. Her films are not often seen these days, rarely showing up on television or at revival theaters. Sparrows represents a darker side of the Pickford cannon, depicting an orphanage where the kids are used as slave labor.

Saturday night will see a screening of Pandora’s Box, a German film directed by G.W. Pabst and starring the iconic American actress Louise Brooks. Brooks was not a great success in American films and she eventually made her way to Germany where she made three films in an effort to resuscitate her career. It is those films upon which her reputation rests today. Returning to America, she found herself blacklisted and never again had much success.

But later her talent for self-promotion, including at least one romantic relationship with a film historian, led to rekindled interest in her career and helped to retroactively establish Brooks as a great and important figure of the silent era. Her credentials as a great actress may be debatable, but her charisma, beauty and sexual appeal are undeniable, and Pandora’s Box presents her in her signature role as a seductive and dangerous woman who brings ruin to those she encounters.

The final show on Sunday night will put the spotlight on another great, if underappreciated, actress of the 1920s, the gifted comedienne Marion Davies. Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, was quite successful and well loved by movie audiences. Hearst, however, wanted to see her play more dignified roles, roles more suitable for the mistress of a great newspaper baron. He poured money into countless lavish costume dramas—clumsy, bloated productions that did nothing for her career—and relentlessly promoted them in his newspapers. Much of this was later satirized in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which helped to unjustly tar Davies’ reputation, rendering her as a mere pawn of Hearst, a no-talent chorus girl riding the great man’s coattails.

The Silent Film Festival will right this wrong with a screening of director King Vidor’s Show People, a light comedy that clearly demonstrates Davies’ charm and talents and features a number of silent-era stars in cameo roles as themselves.

There’s far more on display at the festival, however, and often it is the lesser known films that provide the event’s most fascinating moments.

• Bucking Broadway (1917) is one of only two surviving silent westerns directed by John Ford and stars the great western star Harey Carey. The film will be preceded by an onstage interview with Harey Carey, Jr.

• Au Bonheur Des Dames (1930) is an adaptation of an Emile Zola novel, about a young girl who takes a job in a vast Paris department store.

• “Amazing Tales From the Archives” is a free presentation detailing the hard work, passion and luck that goes into the discovery, preservation and presentation of cinema’s early works.

• Three of Laurel and Hardy’s silent two reelers will be screened Sunday. Few of the duo’s silent films survive, but the few that do show the pitch-perfect timing of their comic pantomime at its peak.

• The Girl With the Hatbox (1927) is a slapstick comedy from Russia that was deemed subversive by Soviet censors.

• The Unholy Three (1925), by Freaks director Tod Browning, is the story of a ventriloquist, played by Lon Chaney, who heads up a madcap scam to rob the rich in a wild, strange pulp story which gave Chaney an opportunity to poke fun at his horror film persona.

“We’ve had people say they’d like to come back as our cats,” says Juliet Lamont.

Personally, I haven’t given much thought to what I’d rather be reincarnated as; I suspect my karmic burden will restrict my options to something along the lines of a slime mold, or a Texas Republican.

But polydactyl tuxedo-cat Nimitz and his gray tabby associate Chester do seem to have good lives. They can watch the world from a deer-fencing enclosure on the garage roof and take an actual elevated catwalk to Lamont’s sister’s house next door. What they can’t do is get out and kill things.

Confining their cats is just one way Lamont and Phil Price invite wildlife to their North Berkeley home. They’ve landscaped and planted to attract birds and butterflies, and their efforts have paid off in a major way. Since they started rebuilding their creekside garden nine years ago, over 50 species of birds have shown up.

There are new faces and voices every year. Earlier this year a rowdy flock of band-tailed pigeons moved in for a while, and this spring was the first time Price and Lamont have heard the ethereal spiraling song of the Swainson’s thrush, and the less musical calls of the oak titmouse. Black phoebes hawk insects over the water and nest under the eaves of the neighboring house. Even a great blue heron has dropped in.

When they moved here in 1994, the view out the back door was a sea of Algerian ivy. “The place had two features,” Lamont recalls: “gorgeous coast live oaks and Codornices Creek.” A hired crew cleared the ivy, and Four Dimensions Landscaping installed an irrigation system and began replanting with native species that were drought-resistant and wildlife-attractant. Price and Lamont have done supplemental planting over the years. Although the ivy still encroaches from neighboring properties, maintenance and vigilant weeding in the first few years kept it from staging a comeback. “It’s really about putting something in instead of ivy,” says Price.

They also took out a eucalyptus tree, whose stump is a popular vantage point for visiting raccoons, and a Monterey cypress.

Most of the new plants came from Berkeley’s estimable Native Here Nursery, some of whose stock originates in the Codornices watershed. Native strawberry has edged out the ubiquitous Bermuda sorrel, and the birds have gone enthusiastically for the berries. Price and Lamont have also put in native bunchgrasses, Berkeley sedge, snowberry, Indian rhubarb, beeplant.

Plants were chosen for deer resistance. “They’ll take a snatch of everything, but it all comes back.” Lamont says. As we talk, two young bucks wander down through the yard toward the creek, one taking a random bite. Price exhorts them to eat the ivy instead; it still borders the native garden on an adjacent property. The deer are very much at home, bringing their new fawns every spring. Their habitual paths have been left in place.

“When deer have established a pathway, it’s hard to shift them off it,” he explains.

The only exception to the natives theme is the front garden, planted as a magnet for hummingbirds and butterflies. Natives like flowering currant, penstemon, and sticky monkeyflower mingle with Mexican bush sage and scabiosa. There’s also native wild rose for the butterflies and bees.

The creek is a work in progress. Price and Lamont haven’t modified the streambed, but they’ve planted willows and red-twig dogwood to buffer extreme flows.

“Urban Creeks Council taught us five different erosion-control techniques,” says Price. “The easiest is willow stakes.”

They’re tracking stream temperatures through the summer and monitoring water quality. Aquatic creatures have responded already: after the eucalyptus and cypress were removed, the damselfly population exploded—and the phoebes were very happy.

“We have newts or salamanders,” Lamont says. “We wish we had frogs; they’re further downstream.”

Just upstream, Codornices Creek is straitjacketed in a concrete box culvert. Last year two mule deer fawns fell into the steep-sided trench; Lamont and Price heard them squealing in the night and hauled them out. Lamont explains their plans for that section of the creek: “We want to restore the neighboring property, take out the gabions and concrete, put in step pools for fish passage, give the creek room for moving around.”

They’re hoping for a grant that will let them get rid of the box channel.

And how do the neighbors feel about all this? “We have them in every year for a barbecue and people love the place”, she continues. “They’re all really excited about doing restoration work themselves. When people have an understanding of what’s going on, they develop a vested interest in it.”

Chester does get out into the garden as well, on a leash. And so have a lot of human visitors: groups from Berkeley Path Wanderers and the Greenbelt Alliance, and hundreds on recent native-plant and Bay-friendly garden tours. If it’s featured on future tours, this thriving experiment in welcoming the natural world is well worth a stop.

A young buck makes his way through the garden toward Codornices Creek. Photograph by Ron Sullivan.

Historical & Current Times Book Group meets on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1249 Marin Ave. 548-4517.

FRIDAY, JULY 14

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

Tilden Tots A nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We will study buterflies from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684.

Bastille Day for Children with stories and activities celebrating Frech Independence Day from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. Free. 647-1111.

Stagebridge Story Workshop with local storytellers on Fridays in July from 10 a.m. to noon at Arts First Oakland Center, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Bring a bag lunch. Cost is $10 per workshop, or $25 for the series. 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org

East Bay Genealogical Society meets at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room of the Family History Center at 4766 Lincoln Ave., Oakland. The speaker will be Lisa Lee, President of the California Alliance of Genealogical Societies. 635-6692.

Help Restore Cerrito Creek from 10 a.m. to noon. Wear shoes with good traction and clothes that can get dirty. Meet at Creekside Park, south end of Santa Clara St., El Cerrito, just north of Albany Hill. All ages welcome; light or heavy tasks. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org

California Historical Radio Society “Live! At KRE” from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the grounds of the old KRE radio station building near Aquatic Park. Cost is $5, children under 12, free. For directions see www.

CaliforniaHistoricalRadio.com 415-821-9800.

62nd Anniversary of the Port Chicago Explosion Ceremony at 10 a.m. at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. RSVP required for shuttle service leaving at 9 a.m. from the parking lot by the Weapons Station’s main gate on Port Chicago Hwy. 925-838-0249.

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. For reservations, call 238-3234.

Friends of the Albany Library Book Sale including children’s books, magazines, records, DVDs and a special “treasure hunt” section, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., at 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. For more information, or to volunteer for the sale, call 526-3720, ext. 16.

Building Healthy Communities Through Food A community workshop on increasing access to healthy foods and making change in our communities, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at EcoVillage Farm Learning Center, 21 Laurel Lane, Richmond. For directions see www.ecovillagefarm.org/directions.htm 310-822-5410.

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St.

Create Habitat By the Bay Join our restoration project on the south Richmond shoreline near the Bay Trail, from 9 a.m. to noon. Tools, gloves, and light refreshments are provided. Youth under 18 need signed permission from a parent or guardian. To register call 665-3689. www.thewatershedproject.org

Bay Street Arts and Music Festival Sat. and Sun. from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Bay Street, Emeryville. www.baystreetemeryville.com

“California Wild” An introduction to wild animals for children at 10:15 a.m. at the Golden Gate Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 5606 San Pablo Ave. 597-5023.

Dynamite History Walk in Point Pinole Discover the park preserved by dynamite on a flat easy-paced 3 mile walk from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Registration required. 525-2233.

Bike Tour of Oakland Explore Oakland on a leisurely two-hour tour. Meet at 10 a.m. at the 10th St. entrance of the Oakland Museum of California. Participants must be over twelve years old and provide their own bikes, helmets and repair kits. Free, but reservations required. 238-3514.

Pool Party Open House with free swimming, live music, and demonstrations of synchronized swimming, diving and stroke techniques, and a pot luck BBQ, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the King School, Hopkins and Colusa. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley and United Pool Council. 548-9050.

New Farmers’ Market in Kensington, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the parking lot behind ACE Hardware at 303 Arlington Ave. at Amherst. 528-4346.

Summer Sunday Forum: Millenium Development Group of the UN Association with Enra Rahmanoie at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306.

“Access is Everything: If it is public information, why can’t we get to it?” with Dan Noyes, Center for Investigative Reporting, Barbara Newcombe, author of Paper Trails, and Barbara Snider, Santa Cruz Public Libraries, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107, 548-1240 (TTY).

Center for Independent Living Relationship Workshop on family planning for disabled youth age 14-22 at 3 p.m. at 2539 Telegraph Ave. Registration required. 841-4776 ext. 128 or email movingon@cilberkeley.org

East Bay Vivarium An introduction to insects, lizards, amphibians and reptiles at 7 p.m. at the Golden Gate Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 5606 San Pablo Ave. 597-5023.

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $3. 524-9122.

Energy Saving Program for Residents CYES is running its 7th annual summer program, providing direct-installation of CFLs, retractable clotheslines, showerheads, and more. This year they have also received funding to provide attic insulation at approximately 75% off the retail price. Services available in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond. Free. 665-1501.

Crowded Fire Theater Company “We Are Not These Hands” a comedy about the friendship between two teenaged girls in a fictional third-world nation, Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. through July 16 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $10- $20. www.crowdedfire.org

Masquers Playhouse “The Fantasticks” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. Sunday Matinees at 2:30 p.m. on July 9 and 16, at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through July 22. Tickets are $18. 232-4031.

Pinole Community Players “Oliver!” the musical, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sun. at 2 p.m., at the Community Playhouse, 601 Tennent Ave., Pinole, through July 15. Tickets are $14-$17. 724-3669, 223-3598.

“Realities: Picture Stories of the Modern World” by Guy Colwell and Mural Drawings by Rocky Baird. Reception for the artists at 5 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., at Telegraph, Oakland. http://estebansabar.com/index.htm

FILM

Labor’s Love Lost: The Films of Vittorio de Seta “Bandits of Orgosolo” at 7 p.m. and “Half a Man” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.

“Microcosm” Group exhibition of artists inspired by patterns in nature. Reception at 2 p.m. at Richmond Art Center, 240 Barrett Ave., entrance at 25th St. 620-6772.

“And All That Jazz” Works by artists relocated from the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Reception at 6 p.m. at Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Wed.-Sat. Exhibition runs to July 27. 644-4930.

Last month’s San Francisco International Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Film Festival screened more than 250 films, an overwhelming bounty featuring a wide array of topics and genres, from documentaries about adoption and AIDS to narratives about love, loss and life. Nearly every facet of sexual and gender politics was explored in a month’s worth of presentations.

It wasn’t always this way of course. The growth of the festival, which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, reflects mainstream America’s gradual awakening to the realities of gay life, a process reflected in film since the medium’s origins at the turn of the last century.

Granted this is the Bay Area, and there are few, if any, communities more open to gays. But the success of the festival, paired with the success of last year’s Brokeback Mountain, provide an opportunity to take a look at how far the movies have come, and a great place to start is the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet.

The Celluloid Closet (1995) is based on the book of the same title by Vito Russo. However, the book, like many books on the history of film, can be tough going if you haven’t seen the hundreds of films discussed; brief descriptions never quite do a scene justice. The documentary version then is a good place to start, with the book as a companion piece, providing in-depth discussion of topics and films of particular interest.

The earliest celluloid image featured in the film is Dickson Experimental Sound Film, an 1895 production by W. L. Dickson, an employee of Thomas Edison and one of the seminal figures in the history of the medium. In his attempt to meld music and pictures to create the first sound film, Dickson played violin while two assistants danced to the music, thereby making it easier to later synchronize sound and image by timing the music to the movements of the dancers.

The film is erroneously identified in Russo’s book as The Gay Brothers when in reality the film had nothing at all to do with homosexuality, and in fact was not even a commercial release; it was a simple in-house experiment, never intended for public consumption. But the film provides a compelling metaphoric image for the documentary as it becomes a sort of gentle and ghostly refrain, with two men dancing blissfully to a song played just for them—a private performance in a dreamlike environment, just dancers and musician against a black backdrop, a moment captured forever but never meant to see the light of day.

From there the documentary moves chronologically through the 20th century, tracking the depictions of gays from the silent era through the early ’90s. The earliest images in silent film were stereotypes of the fairy, the effeminate gay man, usually employed merely for comic relief.

But as the medium matured the depictions of gays likewise matured, with both men and women openly showing affection for members of the same sex, portrayals that were often sensitive and meaningful. Stereotypes still abounded of course, especially in the comedies, but as film came into its own as an art form, reaching a creative peak in the mid to late ’20s, so too did its depiction of homosexuality, be it in the compassionate and loving exchanges between two World War I pilots in Wings (1927) or in Marlene Dietrich’s seductive performance in top hot and tails in Morocco (1930).

The sound era arrived in 1929, and a few years later the Production Code came into effect, clamping down on material deemed immoral, including depictions of homosexuality. But gays did not vanish from Hollywood; they simply went underground.

This era of repression gave rise to a series of stunted versions of homosexuals in the movies. The first was the sissy, dandified and limp-wristed, usually featured as a foil for the leading man, reinforcing the masculinity of the hero. And then things took an even darker turn as gays began to be represented by creepcases, by strange, perverse figures, menacing in tone but ultimately proven impotent and harmless.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) provides an excellent example, with Peter Lorre as the sleepy-voiced Joel Cairo, who enters the office of Humphrey Bogart’s Detective Sam Spade and promptly begins suggestively fondling his walking stick. Later Cairo’s threats are ridiculed by Spade, who easily overpowers the smaller man and slaps him around, leading to one of Bogart’s most famous lines: “You’ll take it and like it!”

The stifled celluloid homosexual had emerged as a grotesque, as a twisted, two-dimensional caricature. But this was just the beginning.

Later incarnations became increasingly absurd. For years they were portrayed as self-destructive, suicidal figures, often with the implication that their grisly fates were well deserved. And this in turn gave rise to the gay as aggressor, with any number of films depicting homicidal gay men and vampire lesbians, dangerous derelicts luring wholesome heteros to their deaths, Basic Instinct providing perhaps the most well-known recent example along these lines.

The Celluloid Closet closes on an optimistic note with Philadelphia (1993), starring Tom Hanks as a man dying of AIDS. However, this was really just a gentle nudge for the mainstream audience, as the filmmakers declined to depict a physical relationship between the Hanks character and his lover, the rationale being that such graphic content would hinder the effort to preach beyond the choir.

Last year’s Brokeback Mountain can then be seen as the next step in a long and ongoing process, having reintroduced sympathetic, humanistic gay love to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. But it also contains traces of the influence of the repression of the early 1930s, for the process that stunted the gay character and transformed him from a simple human being to, by turns, a grotesque, a coward, a suicide and a psychopath, has pushed him toward overcompensation, rendering him now as that most masculine and macho of Hollywood archetypes, the cowboy.

Sure, the movies have come a long way, but they’ve still got a ways to go.

Snowy egrets and coal-black cormorants roosting in trees—in Oakland? Hansel and Gretel along with the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, brought to life with a Magic Key—in Oakland? A Daimyo oak bonsai, in cultivation since Abraham Lincoln’s term as President—in Oakland? Venetian gondolas gliding across sparkling waters under fairy lights—in Oakland? Discover these wonders and more, in Oakland’s Lakeside Park at Lake Merritt.

A combination of fresh and salt-water covering 155 acres, Lake Merritt is the largest man-made lake in the United States and a delightful focal point smack in the middle of urban Oakland. Thanks go to Dr. Samuel Merritt who donated dammed tidal water from the headwaters of Indian Slough for its creation. As part of well-maintained Lakeside Park, it’s a welcome oasis of green surrounded by expansive lawns and shade-giving trees, and offering a host of possibilities to add fun to any day of the week.

After a long absence, I rediscovered Lake Merritt on a crisp, brilliantly sunny Saturday morning. The park and most of its inhabitants were in a mellow mood. It wasn’t too early for enthusiasts cruising the level, paved 3.4-mile path around the lake. A mixed bag of joggers, walkers and cyclists passed across my field of vision. All ages, solo, in pairs and small groups, chatting, attached to cell phone or iPod, attired in the latest techno fitness garb, comfortable sweats or everyday wear, they circled the perimeter, not even pausing to partake of appealing lake-view benches.

Being on a fact-finding mission, I set out to investigate the activities at hand and was drawn to the least mellow area of the park, the Wildlife Refuge. A cacophony of bird conversations filled the air—shrieks, cries, honks and coos—a just representation of the wealth of bird life inhabiting two islands and the lakeside refuge. A population surge of Canada geese, not satisfied with only one settlement area, roamed everywhere in the park. More selective avians restricted themselves to occupying island tree-side perches. Fan-like white plumage marked nestled egrets while cormorants masquerading as black-clad sentinels staked out the highest branches.

A National Historic Landmark and the nation’s oldest wildlife refuge, the mixture of tributary fresh water and tidal salt water provides seasonal and permanent homes to birds, fish and invertebrates. Much of this wildlife is well represented inside the Rotary Science Center, which aims to bring people and nature together learning about estuary ecology. The faces of three school-age boys didn’t move far from the glass fronting a buzzing beehive on the day of my visit. I was more interested in the wall-length display of bird life and a case full of skulls within this rustic, but informative center.

Outside young children focused their interest on the pint-size playground, all bright colors, wood and molded plastic, atop a sand base perfect for digging and building. What birds? Turquoise slide, purple bars, yellow rings and a lavender fire pole like delicious candies were waiting to be sampled.

My next stop was the Boating Center, where aquatic choices for multiple visits lay in wait. Whether you fancy sailing an El Toro, windsurfing, kayaking, paddling a canoe, rowing a boat or exercising your feet with a paddleboat, this would be the right place. And the next time you need to impress that special someone, what could be more romantic than a moonlight gondola ride? Who needs Italy?

In the Demonstration Gardens I was greeted with a placard announcing composting classes and another signifying this as a Bay Friendly Garden. Much like a work-in-progress, there is plenty here to please the eye and tingle those green thumbs. Well defined paths wander among mature growth and newly planted beds. Among the eclectic combinations thrive fuchsias, cacti, lilies, herbs and palms. In the raised vegetable beds of artichoke, Swiss chard and arugula, I was cheered by the profusion of sweet peas in reds, pinks and violets, as well as bright yellow marigolds.

A peaceful haven surrounds the koi pond where the soothing sounds of cascading water, orange bird-of-paradise, blue agapanthus, and an orange torii gate dedicated to the memory of Frank Ogawa abide. A mallard couple lay almost hidden on the banks.

Within the grounds of the Lakeside Garden Center, behind a traditional wood fence capped in steel-gray is located another tranquil refuge, the Bonsai Garden. Over 100 bonsai and suiseki of amazing quality and beauty are lovingly displayed on raised wood platforms in the setting of a simple Japanese garden. Coast live oak, Monterey cypress, Chinese quince, shrunken in an Alice In Wonderland world yet perfect in form and detail, rest among a dry riverbed and stone ornaments. Equally admirable to the oak bonsai given to Lincoln’s ambassador to China was a trident maple, identical to a park-side shade tree, yet only three feet tall.

Saturday morning was too early to see action at the Lawn Bowling Greens but the rectangles of neatly trimmed lawn bordered by benches appeared poised for future matches. At the Edoff Memorial Bandstand music was a faint memory, perhaps still heard by the gentleman practicing tai chi. Even without a concert, this 1923 multi-columned platform topped with red-tiled roof and trimmed in coppery patina is a handsome sight.

Ahead a stream of strollers and wide-eyed toddlers all seemed to be heading in one direction, the music of the calliope a Pied Piper drawing them forth. I caught up with them at the Shoe—the one with so many children and the entrance to Children’s Fairyland, around since 1950. What child could resist a magic kingdom where beloved stories and imagination come to life, where gentle farm animals await their attention, where adults are not admitted unless accompanied by children?

Saturday morning was not too early for action here. The line was long; birthday party guests were arriving in pastel dresses and white Mary Janes and the child-sized Ferris wheel’s enclosed cages were slowly rotating. Though paint colors may have faded, the magic remains.

In 1925, 126 lampposts with 3,400 bulbs lit up the circumference of Lake Merritt for the first time. Any visit is incomplete without following this Necklace of Lights. Glancing from the water’s blue expanse toward buildings fronting the lake, one notes the presence of Oakland’s past through its architecture. Bas reliefs and carved moldings on stately stucco and brick, brimming flower boxes reflecting the park’s natural setting, a curved edifice with aqua tinted glass carrying the water skyward, high rise businesses with faceless windows and smooth lines.

From park settings to open expanses, the circle of lights leads you. Sample the benches, sit and take in aqua depths, great cityscapes, joyous fountains, feasting Canada geese and fellow outdoor enthusiasts. Egrets, cormorants, gondolas, bonsai, Cinderella, fairy lights. In Oakland? Yes, making Lake Merritt much more than the sum of its parts.

For those of you who are regular readers of this column, it will come as no surprise that today’s topic is one related to energy efficiency. Keeping our globe cool means generating less heat in all of our pursuits—or at least burning less oil or gas.

It’s very exciting being alive today. So many things are changing and there is such promise in new technologies and ways of thinking. I can certainly understand and have great compassion for the argument that all of our answers do not lie in science.

Sometimes, science and technology take us in the wrong direction. But given our obsession with having fast travel, ready resources and instant everything, it, at very least, behooves us to buy these marvels with pennies and to make them with plentiful resources.

It is in this spirit that I present the notion of lighting our houses with our little friend the Light Emitting Diode—the LED. LED’s have been around for decades, lighting up the panels on Lieutenant Uhura’s Command Panel and flashing at you from your alarm clock and VCR.

They’ve been doing these things because they are cheap, cool and very long lasting for low wattage applications. But they haven’t been considered for big lighting jobs until the very recent past when LED’s have become capable of providing higher luminosities.

There’s a revolution raging in backwaters that we don’t often hear about and it involves a great race to produce a LED that can complete with the incandescent or fluorescent light bulb. Though the race may not be won, the lager has some major advantages to offer and it may be time to put your feet in the water right now.

I bought two devices this summer. One was a book-light. I saw this at a client’s house and decided I just had to have one. It has a single LED in a spring loaded arm and provides enough light to read by without waking the wife. It will also be fine for reading to the kiddies at camp, if I’m not too embarrassing or stupid to be seen or heard from this year.

The second device is a flashlight. It has 24 LED’s and is good enough to do my job examining things under houses or in attics as long as I don’t have to look way across to the other side.

A year ago, I would not have considered such a purchase but these things are getting cheaper and more effective at a measurable pace.

Now we’re starting to see LED lighting designed specifically for houses and commercial buildings and not surprisingly, it’s starting with bulbs that can replace typical incandescent or halogen ones.

The cost of these is currently very high but before you say no to them, consider what we pay for the electricity to run our 25 cent incandescent bulbs.

Here’s a general breakdown of the efficiency of LED’s compared to our current methods:

A conventional light bulb (incandescent) is about 16 lumens per watt (lm/W) and a tungsten bulb is about 22 lm/W. A fluorescent lamp may range from 50-100 (average of 60) lm/W so it’s not hard to see why we like the fluorescent so well.

LED’s have gotten about 22 lm/W in the past but in 2003 bulbs were tested at 65 lm/W and this last year we saw a test of an LED that was at 131 lm/W. This means that you will soon be able to get as much light out of an LED for about 1/7th the cost.

This technology is clearly growing quickly and if I were much on investing, I’d be looking to major developers of LED home lighting as an investment. You see, in today’s homes, lighting is a major power user. The reason is that incandescent lamps are little heaters.

When you leave a 100 watt bulb going, it just like leaving a tiny oven going (those Easy Bake ovens of the past were heated with a light bulb, but I wouldn’t know anything about those since I never played with them or baked any cupcakes in them no matter what my sister or any of her friends say).

A LED has a number of advantages over both conventional bulbs as well as fluorescents. The first is, of course, the low cost of operation.

They’ve already overtaken fluorescents on that but they are also simpler than the fluorescents to install because they don’t require a ballast. Fluorescents have to control the flow of current.

LEDs can be shaken, stirred or used to beat your electrician over the head and they won’t stop working. Very tough little light source, the LED, so you won’t be replacing them because you banged into it while looking for your ski goggles in the closet.

LEDs last a very, very long time and their cost should be seriously adjusted for their longevity. An LED will typically last 10 years and you’re probably going to find that light fixture ugly before then and want to change it so once again, the little LED races to the finish line.

Now, there are a few problems. They’re not cheap. The equivalent of a common bulb is currently about 20 bucks so that’s 20-80 times the cost of bulbs down at ACE but I guarantee that these will be dropping rapidly.

If you consider that it costs about 25 cents a day to run a 100 watt light bulb and that it will cost about 4 cents a day to run a similar LED lamp, it’s not too hard to figure out that you’re going to save the cost of the bulb in a fairly short time and go on to saving loads over the twenty years that it’s running.

My final argument (for now) in favor of my little friend the LED is that it’s cool. Remember the Easy Bake oven story. These will not qualify.

You can generate hundred of lumens and not have your lamp get warm enough to burn anything. This means much greater home safety since hot bulbs and the hot wires that are feeding these hungry beasts won’t be inside your house.

I know that I tend to beat the global warming drum quite a bit but here’s one more way that we can produce less CO2 without giving up the amount of light you’re used to.

LED’s, by virtue of their generating light through the excitation of various substrates, can come in a range of colors (and, of course, white) and so there are lots of architectural and artistic possibilities waiting to burst forth so keep your eyes peeled for rings, ribbons and fabrics of LED lighting to illuminate and color your world.

Last week I left my readers with a newly installed plant, in its hole of the right size and (shallow) depth, with soil amendments, if any, added on top to be worked in gradually by our ancient allies, the earthworms and other burrowers in the soil.

Suppose this fresh new plant is a tree. Suppose you’re beginning to get over how puny it looks—and it does, because you’ve been smart enough to buy a small youngster which will suffer less from transplant shock and require less digging on your part, and because it just lost a quarter or so of its height when you took it out of the pot in which it stood tiptoe on its roots. And the trunk is a pitiful whip compared to the might thing you have in mind.

You might want to stake that tree. It’s often a good idea, and like most good ideas it works better if you know why you’re doing it.

What you want to do is support that reedy little trunk until—only until—it can reliably support itself and the canopy of leaves above it.

Don’t stake a tree to keep the neighbors’ overly enthusiastic skateboarder kids or your beloved klutzy dog from breaking the new tree in half. That requires a different sort of thing—a fence or guardrail around the tree, not touching it, and well below the first branches.

The best time to stake is when planting, so you don’t traumatize any exploratory roots. I like big fat wooden stakes which will rot underground eventually. Those single stakes with a jughandle gizmo I see on the streets might work in a pinch, but they’re a compromise.

You want two stakes, and something padded and a little flexible to tie the tree. The things that look like bits of used tire and wire are fine.

Drive the stakes in as deep as you can, with at least a fist’s width between each and the tree in the middle.

Here’s the subtlety: arrange the trio so they face as a chorus line into the prevailing wind. Here, that’s usually from the west, so the stakes would go north and south of the tree.

Trees build up trunk tissue faster when the trunk gets some “exercise” by flexing in the wind. Some Cal professor reportedly got a bunch of grad students to untie half a set of firmly pinioned trees daily and sway them by hand for half an hour, then retie them.

Those trees got fat faster than their peers who were kept immobile. Amazing what can be done with academic indenture.

The stakes should be below the lowest branches, so those don’t get beaten up on them when it’s windy.

Leave branches on as low as possible for a couple of years; that beefs up the trunk too. Remove them before you’d need a saw for that.

Work the ties in a figure-8, around the trunk, crossed, and then affixed to the stakes.

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

“Keep the A’s in Oakland” Tailgate Party from 5 to 7 p.m. at the B parking lot tailgate area on the Hegenberger side. Entertaintment and speeches from local leaders. chooseorlooseoakland@yahoo.com

Stagebridge Story Workshop with local storytellers on Fridays in July from 10 a.m. to noon at Arts First Oakland Center, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Bring a bag lunch. Cost is $10 per workshop, or $25 for the series. 444-4755.

Celebración: Food and Music of Peru at 6:30 p.m. at Crowden Center for Music, 1475 Rose St. Suggested donation $15. Please RSVP to 526-5194.

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041.

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684.

Crown Beach Clean-up in the aftermath of the 4th from 9 a.m. to noon at Crown Beach, Alameda. Trash bags, gloves and other equipment provided by Save the Bay. 452-9261, ext. 109. www.saveSFbay.org

Oakland Heritage Walking Tour of the F. M. “Borax” Smith Estate from 10 a.m. to noon. Meet at the redwood tree, corner of McKinley Ave. and Home Place East, one block off Park Blvd. Cost is $5-$15. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/

walkingtours

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St.

Guide Dogs for the Blind Meet a puppy in-training at 2 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.

Sushi Basics Learn the natural and cultural history of sushi as you prepare and taste several different types. Fee is $25-$39. Registration required. 636-1684.

Himalayan Cooking Class from 3 to 5 p.m. at Taste of the Himalayas. Cost is $50. Registration required. 849-4983.

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552.

SUNDAY, JULY 9

Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Social Justice Picnic from noon on, at Emeryville Marina Park. Take Powell St. exit off I-80 all the away to the end. Bring your own choice of meat or veggies to grill or main dish, a side dish, salad or dessert to share. 436-6125.

Toddler Nature Walk for two and three-year-olds to look for butterflies and other insects at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

National Organization for Women Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be Yvonne Cooks, executive director of the CA Coalition for Women Prisoners. 287-8948.

Full Moon Walk at John Miur National Historic Site See nocturnal animal and plant life and walk the same trail John Muir walked with his daughters. For reservations and details of meeting time and location, call 925-228-8860.

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $3. 524-9122.

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.

“How to See Your Health: A talk on diagnostic techniques in Chinese medicine at 7:30 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200.

Raging Grannies of the East Bay invites new folks to join us from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. to sing, or write outrageously political lyrics to old familiar tunes, and have fun at Berkeley Gray Panthers office, 1403 Addison St., in Andronico’s mall. 548-9696.

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 548-3991.

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 12

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.

“Five Factories: Workers Control in Venezuela” a documentary at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. “Stories from an American Mill” will also be shown. Donations of $5 accepted.

“Spirit of the Rainforest” An introduction to wild animals for children at 10 a.m. at the Martin Luther King Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 6833 International Blvd. 615-5728.